Funny how much time we spend awaiting the next good thing. We add up hours planning trips to Hawaii, preparing fancy dinners, and trimming Christmas trees just so. These moments of prepping futures are like raindrops in the wind. They are lush and wet, vital with energy, yet as soon as destiny arrives, they flail and fall into the great mystery of timelessness.

There is a lot of talk these days about happiness. What does it look like. Where does it live. Who’s got it and how can I get some more. Scientific research now graphs a clear line between quality of life, health and happiness. It turns out that enjoying good, positive, even challenging relationships boosts our capacity for pleasure. In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert combines science and case studies to show how a healthy social life can equal a healthy inner and outer one, too. The book’s a best seller, of course. Not only that, it was recently turned into a documentary and featured on PBS’ This Emotional Life.

Top that with popular blog and book The Happiness Project and the now classic tour de force Eat, Pray, Love, and our collective hunger for awakening rears its head. These books are externalizations of a shared internal quest for joy and meaning. We all have the Joy — deep down or riding the surface — but somewhere along the way, for many of us, it slips between our fingers.

Popular psychology and spiritual thought are full of step-by-step ways to get happy. In all things, we want a recipe for joy and contentment. While not ‘desiring’ per se, anything in particular, except perhaps the pleasure of not desiring anything at all, Buddhism offers a path called the Middle Way. In his book, The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama answers questions that remind us Westerners that the way to all good things is within us. It is the Source. It’s not about traveling the world to find it — although some find it this way. It is about going deep and cultivating connection with our divine essence.

Over sixty years ago, Viktor Frankl portrayed happiness as the art of survival amid terror. His historic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, models the undaunted power of the human spirit, and how, by changing our thinking, we can change our reality. Frankl may have been waiting for something good to happen — his freedom and the end of war. But he was waiting by taking each moment as a breath of new life and finding magic and beauty in the ugliest of places.