In my last post, I offered a suggestion about why you may not be as happy as you'd like to be. The inability to be where you are, your discontent with what is, siphons off the spiritual energy you need to meet and experience God here and now. And meeting and experiencing the Divine is the source of all happiness. There may be some very good reasons you're not happy, why you don't want to be where you are. I won’t minimize them. Wanting to be elsewhere is a universal human condition. By “elsewhere” I’m referring, of course, not so much to a place but to a condition. This discontent with things as they are is the ambition that drives a politician to address some kind of change for the common good. It’s the force that drives a scientist toward a new discovery. It drives us to plant a garden, hang a painting, clean the house, loose weight. It’s a drive that has tremendous power for creative improvement.

But it also has tremendous power to keep us perpetually dissatisfied. When it does, it splinters our energies and fragments our lives. It keeps us off balance, and alienates us from the spiritual grounding we desperately need. The trouble is, we can become addicted to this discontentment. When we do, we’re walking toward disaster spiritually. You might say that this drive to always be somewhere other than where we are—whether it’s spiritual ambition or discontent with life as it is—leaves us with our feet planted firmly in midair, neither in heaven, nor on earth.