Happiness often doesn’t come easily and is even more challenging as the demands of life grow in magnitude over time and readily interfere with our best laid plans.
Thus, to better ensure as much happiness as possible enters our lives, we’d need facilitate its growth. And while a host of factors play into happiness emerging (many of which are the practices listed in Centerlife), calibrating its beginning point has a lot to do with our experience of it.
What this means is you will need to get your expectations properly grounded in order to build a deeper well from which happiness has more space to flourish. What I mean by this is, if your expectations are unrealistic, and your wants and desires never ending, you can never be truly happy or free fulfilled because you will always be looking outside yourself for happiness and it will remain an ever moving and elusive target—you will never feel good because you will always be on the move trying to obtain too lofty of, and unrealistic of heights.
So get rooted instead. Take a yearlong sabbatical from the newspaper, Internet, television, and the competition culture and fill your time with walks in nature, and time with your kids and family instead. Begin studying and learning again. Buy a book on biology, nature, the cosmos, and spirituality and watch your happiness blossom.