How to embrace happiness

All of a sudden you feel intensely happy, but at that exact same moment of bliss you think: What if I lose all this? Journalist Nina Siegal wonders why we find it so hard to embrace happiness, and especially: How can we learn to do so? 

I remember when I first had the thought: I was about sixteen years old and I had a jacket that I really loved. It was red, comfortable, it fit me perfectly and felt like an expression of my personal style. I thought: This jacket makes me happy. I’m so glad I have it. Well, within a week it was gone. Who knows how I lost it. I wasn’t someone who often misplaced things—I’m still not—and so it was very weird that it just disappeared. Somehow, I came to the conclusion that it was precisely because I had become so attached to it, because owning it had made me so happy: that must have been why I had lost it.