I guess, this is pretty well known (and if not, let it be known now) that many times our mind starts believing that all the happiness rests on one specific event. Till that event occurs, there is no happiness. And the world will be so full of happiness once the event has occurred.
For instance, a job change. You may be frustrated with your job. Your mind will start believing that for you to be happy, job change is a must. No job change, no happiness. As soon as the job change happens, the world will become heaven. This belief will take such deep roots in your mind that whole day and night, you would be thinking about job change alone and would remain unhappy. In a way, your mind gets stuck on this one thought.
You would have also seen some congested roads. On those congested roads, there would be a point which people would call bottleneck. Everyday, the traffic would get stuck at that bottleneck. If you are in Bangalore, I am sure you see it everyday. Over a period of time, the administration would take some step and eliminate that bottleneck (by means of flyovers or some other traffic adjustments). As soon as this bottleneck is removed, another bottleneck would emerge somewhere else on the same road. So, effectively there would always some point on a congested road where the traffic would be stuck.
Now coming back to the mind and happiness. So, when we are unhappy about something, our thoughts also (kind of) get stuck and we start believing that once this obstruction in the flow of our mind is removed, the operations of our mind would again become smooth and we would be happy. But what happens is a little more than that. Soon, the mind finds something else to get stuck to. Just like removing a bottleneck on road results in the bottleneck getting shifted, removing the object of unhappiness from mind results in the creation of another object that makes mind unhappy.
Happiness is a very very strange thing. It comes in visibility through the corner of the eye. And any attempt to catch hold of it results in its disappearing from the horizon ;)
Oh, how foolish it all sounds now. All my life, I was running after happiness. And now I realized that happiness is when you don’t want anything. If you want happiness, happiness will elude you…