Committing to being present and engaged with wherever you are seems to me to be the secret to happiness. The happiest, most stable people I have known were hap

Committing to being present and engaged with wherever you are seems to me to be the secret to happiness. The happiest, most stable people I have known were happy and stable no matter where they were. This showed up most obviously as grace under pressure in not-great situations, whether traveling or on an adventure. But it also showed up in their willingness and happiness to bop around locally. They didn’t look down on, or disengage from, a day hike they’d done a dozen times just because it wasn’t a grand adventure. Same level of enthusiasm and fun. I don’t have a secret for how to be this way. But once I noticed it, it seemed like something I wanted to try to work toward.