The historian and philosopher Will Durant once described his long search for happiness. He looked for it in knowledge, and found only disillusionment. He looked for it in travel, and found only weariness. He looked for it in wealth, and found discord and worry. He looked for it in his writing, and found only fatigue.

Then, one ordinary day, he noticed a woman sitting in a small car by a station, a sleeping infant in her arms. A man stepped down from an arriving train, walked over, and gently kissed the woman; then he leaned in and kissed the baby ever so softly, so as not to wake it. The little family drove quietly away.

In that small, tender scene Durant felt a quiet revelation. Happiness, he realized, is not waiting in some distant, extraordinary place. It lives inside the ordinary functions of daily life — in love freely given and received, in the gentle, everyday moments we so often pass by without noticing.

Perhaps that is the whole secret: we keep searching for happiness as though it were a far-off destination, when all along it has been travelling beside us on the road itself.

There is no road to happiness — happiness is the road.