Our obsession with happiness - as though it were yet another purchasable product - is relatively recent. As a child I once tried to stand in the end of a rainbow, to feel the colours on me, running back and forth across a wet field with friends shouting directions across the cowpats. But rainbows can't be seen from close up. And the irony of happiness as a "product" is that it disappears when we look directly at it, as ephemeral as that rainbow.
From Katheryn Heyman essay entitled Joy to the World.
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