My Virtual Reading Room

I truly wish you a happy New Year--and that at the end of it, when you "balance up" the preceding twelve months, you'll discover what you have gained and what you have lost, what you have learned and what you have yet to learn, what you have met with courage and what you have met merely with irritation. Happiness is not for every minute of every hour. It is a flash, a wonder, a reaching up. It is no more stable than we are, and not to be captured and held any more than a wild bird that darts past us on its way to the far horizon. Happiness is a sudden gift out of the blue. Contentment, however, is something else again. It is stronger stuff, less exciting but a great deal more enduring.

And so I wish you happiness--contentment's elusive sister--and I also wish you contentment itself, that it may walk beside you enduringly. For it does, you know, only half the time we don't stop to think about it. Contentment is taking things as they come: love, work, the beauty all about us and the knowledge that, although heaven may seem far away, He who created it, as well as the earth and ourselves, is as close to us as the air we breathe--as ready, as simple, and as accessible to all of us as that.

(Faith Baldwin, from "Face Toward the Spring")