Happiness is...

If it's been said once, it's been said a thousand times in a myriad of ways:

• Happiness is not having what you want. It is wanting what you have. --Rabbi Hyman Schachtel 
• When you can't have what you want, it's time to start wanting what you have. --Kathleen A. Sutton 
• If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time. -- Josh Billings  
• ...it's that - if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right? --Dorothy, Wizard of Oz

And the famous UU quote: Do what you can. Want what you have. Be who you are. -- Forrest Church

What if what you have is illness, loss, and/or suffering? And don't tell me to cherish suffering, the gifts in things like cancer, or the inevitable silver lining, because I don't. I wouldn't wish some of the devastating loss I've experienced on anyone. I think I have become more compassionate because of those losses, but I don't believe that to become compassionate, you have to suffer first.

But, what I have discovered is that I cherish potential, and never more so than during hard times. Happiness is not wanting the cancer that you have, it is believing in the potential to be happy, to be useful, to be loved and to love in spite of cancer or loss or suffering.