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What if the thing we keep chasing is the reason we cannot rest?

When I was six or seven, I was certain life would be sorted once I could ride my bike. I learnt, felt brilliant for a little while, and then Monday arrived. The finish line had moved again.

We do this with money, health, work, relationships, meditation and even inner peace. We tell ourselves, "I'll be happy when..." Yet when the thing arrives, it slowly becomes normal and another carrot appears ahead of us.

In this episode, I explore why wanting more is not the enemy, why happiness comes and goes, and why contentment may be a kinder aim. I share the image of the carrot that moves with the cart, the importance of pausing halfway up the mountain, and a simple practice for catching the moment we try to skip the life we are already living.

This is not about giving up our goals or pretending money, health and security do not matter. It is about taking the next step without making it responsible for finally allowing us to be here.

Stillness in the Storms is independent and advert free. To contact me, join the Weekly Calm or support my work, visit https://stevenwebb.uk

What is in this episode

• (00:00) What if chasing happiness is stopping us from resting?
• (00:55) Learning to ride a bike and discovering the feeling did not last
• (02:00) The fairytale promise of happily ever after
• (03:15) Thanking the people who keep the podcasts advert free
• (03:50) The carrot that keeps moving with the cart
• (05:10) Noticing the happiness that is already here
• (06:10) Why wanting more can still be useful
• (08:40) Pausing halfway up the mountain and looking back
• (09:50) New headphones and how quickly better becomes normal
• (10:25) How gain and loss change the way the same life feels
• (12:30) Happiness, joy and sadness as experiences that come and go
• (14:20) Asking what is enough for this day
• (15:30) Finding life in its ordinary moments
• (16:40) The "I'll be happy when" practice
• (17:50) Taking the next step without skipping this one

One practice for this week

When you hear yourself say, "I'll be happy when," or, "It will be okay when," pause.

Notice what you are asking the next moment to give you. Then take one breath and let this moment be what it is. You can still take the next step. You just do not have to skip your life to get there.

Notable quotes from the recording

"What if the one thing you keep chasing is the reason you cannot be happy? Is the reason you cannot rest?" (00:00)

"If you're not happy until you get that, you will never be happy." (08:40)

"What is enough for this day? What is enough right now for you?" (14:20)

"When you stop chasing, you realize the carrot will return and it was there all along." (16:20)

"The chase stops being a prison when you stop. Take the next step if it's yours to take." (17:50)

Thank you

Tim, Patricia, Jess and Cheryl. Your support helps keep Stillness in the Storms and Inner Peace Meditations free from adverts.

The present moment is a portal out of suffering and into something much deeper than any concept of happiness. Eckhart Tolle what if the one thing you keep chasing is the reason you cannot be happy, is the reason you cannot rest?

So we imagine happiness as something that's waiting for us once we get to our next milestone, once we get a pay rise, once we get a better job, once we sort out our health, once we lose a few pounds, once we just get that credit card paid off or something. We're always looking for that bit that, I'm happy now, and we know realistically it will never actually happen.

Because I remember, and I told this story on an older podcast that I can remember thinking when I was about 6, 7 years old that I would be totally sorted the moment I could ride my bike. And I went to my nan's. I stayed there for a few weeks. I learned to ride my bike by just pushing it up a slope and just rolling down.

And eventually I started pedaling around the corner. And, yeah, it lasted into the evening, maybe even a few days, until I probably got back to school on Monday when I went back home.

And it didn't last much longer. That's happiness for you. And I think it's a brilliant evolution thing, the fact that we are not happy most of the time.

Hi, I'm Steven Webb, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms. Today is about happiness and about can we ever achieve a sense of happiness?

This is a podcast that helps you through some of the most difficult times in life and just helps you see life in a lighter way so you suffer a little bit less. And my whole ethos on the spiritual journey is if we're suffering a little bit less, then we're doing okay. It's working.

So I want to talk about happiness in a way that is not the fairytale version. I think Disney has a lot to answer for.

I think Disney has ruined a our love story and our romance that in about an hour and a half, okay, Compressed lightly, you end up incredibly happy. And all you gotta do is walk off into the sunset and you have a brilliant relationship forever. And no one ever sees the bad sequel.

Unless It's Dirty Dancing 2 or something like that, or I don't know if you ever watched Dirty Dancing. Brilliant film. Originally. Whenever they try to recreate an original classic like that, it's never the same. Like Grease, too.

I don't know if you ever had that in America anyway. Yeah, of course you did. It was right Ohio. Of course it was American. I was one of the People in the play once when I was at school. Anyway, I go off.

So today I'm talking about the Happiness Never after. And you'll see what I did that Happiness Never After. I like that title. I think it's pretty cool.

But just before we do that, a thank you to everyone who supported my work this week and supports and keeps these podcasts free. Tim, Patricia, Jess, Cheryl.

It genuinely means a lot to me and I know to everybody else that listens to these podcasts and doesn't have to put up with adverts and we could just get on with it the same as the Inner Peace Meditations podcast with no adverts whatsoever.

If you want to reach out to me, message me, join the Weekly Calm or support any of the work I do, just head over to stephenweb.uk so what is happiness like and the way we chase it? Think of the story. And I kind of. I think I made up this story in my head at some point. I don't think it's a Zen story.

I don't think it's anything but. Just imagine like a horse or an ox or something like that. And it's got.

It's walking along, it's got like some kind of carriage behind him, and over the top of him is a big, like, stick with a little bit of string and a carrot on the end. And that carrot is the happiness. So that ox or the horse or whatever is marching slowly towards the carrot because it wants to get to that carrot.

And the problem is the faster it marches, the more it goes towards it. The carrot moves with the cart which it's towing, so it never really gets there.

And the problem is with that is the faster you go, the more you march, the more you try to reach it, the further away it gets. At some point, your best thing you can do, and I love analogies like this, the best thing you can do is stop.

And then the carrot will swing away from you, maybe even go out of sight. But if you just wait long enough and you stop chasing the carrot, it'll come right back and you can take a bite. And this is what happiness is.

When we sit down and stop chasing it, we'll end up seeing the happiness that we've already got. And I know you know that, I know that. We all know that. We know that from teenagers, really. But we don't live it.

We don't embody that feeling of, no, I'm okay, I'm happy now. We're always looking to that bit at the top of the mountain that Holiday, that good diagnosis and we're always fearing the bad ones.

Or that, like I said at the beginning, pay the credit card off and once I'm out of debt, once I've got my new car. But all of these things, you think back, did anything that ever happened to you make you permanently happy ever after? No.

Not even when you started dating? Not even when you got to 18 years old and you were able to drink? Not even when you pass your test in a car? Not even when you met your dream partner?

Just nothing lasts forever because it becomes normal. And that's just the way it is. But I think this is evil genius.

It's absolutely brilliant for evolution because if you did not have happiness settled down to exactly what you got right now, and you had that baseline and happiness wasn't something that you had to desire, we'd still be sitting in caves, we'd be still grunting along with the Neanderthals and everything like that.

We would still be in loincloths or whatever they're called, marching around or walking around forest, because we would have no desire to improve our lives. We would just, well, I'm cold, so I need to warm up or I'm hungry. I need to have that.

So that basic desire to improve and be happy and to get to the top and to achieve something is a brilliant evolution trap that we're in. It's just the way it is. And I think it's brilliant because it keeps us from stagnating, it keeps us from sitting back and not achieving anything.

Otherwise we would end up achieving that one gold medal. We'd never go back to the Olympics. We would end up achieving that one result at school and we'd never go on and do more.

We would never want to beat ourselves in the next prize. We would never want to run faster or achieve more. We would end up just being purely happy with our lot.

So here's the problem and the genius part of it. So it's like a paradox. The more you realize you're happy in the moment, the more happy you'll be.

But you also got to realize that this moment isn't all you can have. It's like you need a purpose in life, but recognizing your purpose in life is to do whatever you're doing right now.

And it's that paradox of wanting and recognizing you still have. And you can desire more peace, you can desire a better meditation, you can desire deeper meditation, a better spiritual journey.

All of these things and is worthwhile desires. But if you're not happy until you get that, you will never be happy. So a good analogy would be you want to climb to the top of the mountain.

You want the best job, or you want whatever it is you desire. But halfway up, take a seat, turn around and look at the valley. Look. Look how far you've got. Look at how much you have achieved.

Take stock of what's in your life right now. Take stock of how much you've achieved. It may not feel like it all the time.

You may still have debt, you may still have issues with whatever it is that's really bugging you and getting you down at the moment.

But if you think how far you have come and how much you have achieved, how many things that you desired at one point that you wanted and you ended up getting that you thought would make you permanently happy. And I know you know this, like I said earlier, we don't live up to that. We don't actually practice.

So when we sit down to do a meditation, we want a good meditation. Or when we put on our headphones and parts of music, we want it brilliantly clear.

I'm rejected now because I've got bored my headphones and I'm really fancying a new pair. And that's what we do, that's what the body does. Everything becomes normal in the end.

I think there was a story I heard, I read it in a book about a person that had his house. He had his wife in his car and he had this nice picket fence, white picket fence, and everything was going really well.

And someone said to her, how are you doing? He said, yeah, I'm okay. I'm working too many hours. I don't get enough time with the family and things like that. I could do with more money.

And then they asked the same to a homeless person that did not have very. I had very little. And he said to him, how are you doing? He said, yeah, I'm okay.

I could do some more food to eat and is coming in cold and all that and I'm doing okay. But I could do with these couple of things. And then they imagine the roles reversing.

So that guy that had everything loses everything and ends up on the park bench. And you go to him on day one, how are you doing? He said, I'm absolutely miserable. I hate my life.

Yesterday I had all these things and now today I've got nothing. I've lost everything.

But then if you go back to and you speak to the one that was homeless and has now gained everything, it'd be like, I won the lottery. I am the happiest person in the world. My life is amazing. I just cannot believe my luck. But then you go to them again in six months time.

The person that won the lottery and said, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm okay. I'm a bit fed up with people asking me for money, you know, it's.

I'm looking at buying another new car, the car I bought the other day a few months ago. That's just. It's okay now. So the life become normal for them and the same as the person that had everything and ended up homeless.

You speak to him in six months time and how you doing? Well, I could do some more food, you know, I'm a bit tired and you know, the nights are a bit cold. I could do with a blanket.

Because that's what happens to us in our life. We become. I don't know, it's not complacent. I'm trying to look for another word in it, but it becomes the normal.

And I think happiness is an experience the same as joy, the same as peace, the same as a feeling of depression or a feeling of sadness or excitement. They're all experiences of emotions that arise and fall away. But we look at happiness as something that will come and stay.

And that's why I love the title Happiness Never after. Because there is no happiness Ever after. It's a fairy tale. It doesn't exist and it brilliantly doesn't exist.

That's why I think the Buddha's laughing. You got the bigger Buddha with all the jewels all over him and he's just laughing because it's all a joke, it's just all a game and it's all.

No matter how much you have, you'll be in the similar position then. Don't get me wrong, if you don't have enough money to pay your bills and you do get a job, there's enough money to pay your bills.

It will make things easier and make things happier. And if you don't, and if you have a lot and you lose a lot, it will make you miserable.

I'm not completely delusional that, you know, everything's fine and everything's normal and everything's just the same kind of bumpy road. But on the face of it, it is true. You can only have so much money to make you relatively comfortable.

And the idea is not to get too comfortable with where you are, but to become comfortable enough. And that leads me onto a brilliant question. What is enough for this day? What is enough right now for you what would make you content.

And I think that contentment is the aim.

Aim to become content and then enjoy experiences of happiness, of joy, of desires and excitement and real good experiences and also embrace the bad experiences, the loneliness, the sadness, because they're experiences that come and go as well. So just before I wrap up and give you a practice for the week, it's just a matter of still enjoy the journey.

I know this is just normal advice, everyday advice. Enjoy the journey. It's all part of the journey. That's a reality. That's how simple it is. We complicate everything.

We genuinely think that if only life was a bit more like that Disney movie as children. We do think that it could be like that and it's just not. Life is mundane. Life is about becoming content.

Life is about enjoying the day, seeing the butterfly land and seeing the little leaf bend down as it does, seeing the dirt on the ground and the smell of the rain and all those little things that, you know, as you get older, you appreciate a whole lot more because you stop chasing. And when you stop chasing, you realize the carrot will return and it was there all along. So, one practice for the week.

When you hear a sentence or anything similar to I'll be happy when or it'll be okay when, just pause on that and just recognise what you're doing. Recognize how much you're trying to skip life.

There's a wonderful movie, and it's called Click, where he gets given a remote control and he can skip parts of life that he doesn't enjoy. The family barbecue, he skips it and all the different things.

And it's an old enough movie now that you know the ending, so I'm not going to ruin anything.

But basically, at the end of the movie, he realizes that he skipped all the really important parts because he thought those important parts were the mundane, boring parts. And that's the reality.

So when you find yourself trying to want to skip the next moment or skip to something that's going to make you happier, just take a step back and breathe and enjoy this moment for what it is. Just one small little moment. Opportunity to be peaceful. Opportunity to have joy in the moment.

I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Thich Nhat Hanh. Happiness is present right in the present moment if you know how to stop and live deeply. I just want to say thank you to everybody that supports.

Thank you for being here this week. Thank you for hanging in there with me when I have my wobbles. And yeah, take care. Have a wonderful week and I love you.