Happiness is Not Where You Are. Happiness is Who You Are.

My wife, Louise, asked me the other night if I was happy here in Georgetown, Texas, a town we had recently moved to from Rogers, Arkansas. She also asked me if I had been miserable in Arkansas. I answered "I'm not happy because of where I am, I am happy because of who I am."There were parts of Arkansas that I absolutely adored. The community we had lived in is one of the best in the world. 

But my music was in Austin and I traveled there a couple of times a year… That was just fine, and I was happy despite having been taken away from my audience and my community in Austin, Texas. A place I had lived for 42 years.

This brings to mind a story that was told by a lady named Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch lady who was interned by the Nazis as a child. While in the concentration camp, she and her fellow inmates were placed in a part of the camp that was filled with fleas-clouds of biting fleas. And she was smiling. Her fellow inmates asked: "why on earth are you smiling?" And she responded thusly: "have you seen any guards around here?" The answer was "no, there are no guards around here". She smiled and noted  "that's because of the fleas."

That my friend is creation at its best. She created a separate environment by changing her mind about the one she was in.