Contentment: Take Your Happiness with You | ABC’s of Happiness Blog Tour

Rural Mom is pleased to offer an excerpt from Louise Baxter Harmon’s Happiness A to Z: The Gleeful Guide to Finding and Following Your Bliss as part of the “ABC’s of Happiness” Blog Tour.  We hope you enjoy these lovely thoughts on happiness and have a joy-filled day!  

Contentment
Take Your Happiness With You

I have a friend who is an adventure travel guide and writer named Brad Olsen. My nickname for him is “world stomper” because he is six-feet, nine-inches tall and he strides across the globe spreading cheer, exploring beautiful and amazing places, writing and creating art from his journeys. When Brad traveled the Indian subcontinent, he went from the uppermost territories including the Himalayan foothills all the way to the shores of Goa and the spice-filled tropics of Kerala. As I previously mentioned, he is an adventurer, so he visited temples, sacred sites and generally soaked up the myriad cultures of Mother India. He had the opportunity to meet a guru known as Osho at his sanctuary and paid respects in his literal rite of passage there. Osho took one look at Brad and dubbed him Santosh, which translates to “contentment.” Osho also laughed for a good long time, seemingly delighted by this big, tall happy camper who does indeed embody all that contentment connotes—gladness, serenity, satisfaction and above all, ease. I take this story as a good reminder to take your happiness with you wherever you may be. It is the best of ambassadors.

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things. —Henry Ward Beecher

Money doesn’t always bring happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars. —Hobart Brown

I didn’t want to be rich. I just wanted enough to get the couch reupholstered. —Kate (Mrs. Zero) Mostel

Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money. —Anonymous

The man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. —Henry David Thoreau

A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn’t let them get her down. —Beverly Sills

The happiest and most contented people are those who each day perform to make the best of their abilities. —Alfred A. Montapert

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does. —J. M. Barrie

The secret of happiness is to count your blessings while others are adding up their troubles. —William Penn

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. —Bertrand Russell

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness. —Charles Spurgeon

Where wealth and freedom reign, contentment fails, and honour sinks where commerce long prevail. —Oliver Goldsmith

Since every man who lives is born to die, and none can boast sincere felicity, with equal mind, what happens let us bear, nor joy nor grieve too much for things beyond our care. Like pilgrims, to th‘ appointed place we tend; the world’s an inn, and death the journey’s end. —John Dryden

Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs…of being foursquare with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do. —David Grayson

At the end of our time on earth, if we have lived fully, we will not be able to say, “I was always happy.” Hopefully, we will be able to say, “I have experienced a lifetime of real moments, and many of them were happy moments.” —Barbara De Angelis

Embracing and appreciating “now” reminds you of what it took to get here.  —David Mezzapelle

Contentment furnishes constant joy. Much covetousness, constant grief. To the contented, even poverty is joy. To the discontented, even wealth is a vexation. —Ming Sum Paou Keën

In Paris a queer little man you may see, a little man all in gray; rosy and round as an apple is he, content with the present whate’er it may be, while from care and from cash he is equally free, and merry both night and day! “Ma foi! I laugh at the world,” says he, “I laugh at the world and the world laughs at me!” What a gay little man in gray. —Pierre-Jean de Béranger

Some things are of that nature as to make one’s fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache. —John Bunyan

We’ll therefore relish with content whate’er kind Providence has sent nor aim beyond our pow’r; for, if our stock be very small, ’tis prudent to enjoy it all, nor lose the present hour. —Nathaniel Cotton

Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough. —Oprah Winfrey

It’s not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.  —Sheryl Crow

Remember, it is one thing to desire success from achievement. It’s another to allow money and materialism to blur your view of reality.  —David Mezzapelle

Happy the man, of mortals happiest he, whose quiet mind from vain desires is free; whom neither hopes deceive, nor fears torment, but lives at peace, within himself content; in thought, or act, accountable to none but to himself and to the gods alone.  —George Granville

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  —Annie Dillard

(c) 2015 Happiness A to Z: The Gleeful Guide to Finding and Following Your Bliss
By Louise Baxter Harmon
Foreword by June Cotner, author of Graces
ISBN: 978-1-63228-007-7