What if happiness weren’t at the end of the road, but in how you walk it?
Maybe you’ve spent a long time waiting to arrive somewhere that doesn’t exist.
There was a time in my life when I was starting over.
Newly separated, reorganizing everything, not quite sure where I was headed.
In those days I had a dear friend who wished for me, with all the love in the world, that life would bring me something big. She saw abundance in everything, everywhere. And every time she wished it for me, I would laugh.
Not because I thought it was impossible.
But because I didn’t see it for me.
And in the middle of that moment, I did something small. I put up a sign where I could see it every morning, the moment I opened my eyes.
It said: “I want to be happy today.”
It didn’t say “I want to achieve.” It didn’t say “I want to get.” It didn’t place happiness in some later.
It said be happy. Today.
And I started doing exactly that. Every morning I chose, in small ways, my way of being well that day. A slow coffee. A walk. A conversation that made me laugh. I wasn’t chasing a different life. I was choosing how to inhabit the one I already had.
In psychology, this is studied as the arrival fallacy,
a phenomenon named by the psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who observed something that sounds familiar to many of us: we believe we’ll be happy “when” we arrive —when we get the job, the house, the relationship— and when we arrive, the happiness we expected rarely shows up the way we imagined, or it fades fast. We get used to it, and we set the goal a little further out.
In everyday life, it’s simpler.
“I’ll be fine when…” is a sentence that never quite comes true. Because the “when” keeps moving. There’s always a next when.
And while we wait for that moment that will solve everything, we miss the only thing we truly have: today.
Enjoyment doesn’t arrive when you reach it.
It arrives when you stop making it conditional.
Let me tell you how my story continued.
Months after that sign, Frank arrived. And with him, a life I didn’t chase — one that fell into place precisely when I stopped running after something, and started choosing from within.
It didn’t come because I was looking for it. It came because I stopped making my well-being conditional on its arrival.
That, for me, is conscious enjoyment.
It’s not a reward for having accomplished. It’s not the prize at the end of the list.
It’s a decision you make today, in small ways, without asking permission from any future achievement.
My name is Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for that: for you to stop waiting for the day you’ll finally be happy, and start choosing it in the one you’re already living.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you’d like to continue from here, I wrote a digital book for exactly this: Begin With I Am, a practice for returning to yourself and choosing your well-being from within. You can download it in the ebooks section, and it comes alongside The Language of the Future — the words you build with from there.
For today, just one question:
What are you waiting to reach before you let yourself enjoy… that you could perhaps start choosing today?