There is no secret recipe for happiness and contentment.
The individuals who move through life joyously have not necessarily been blessed with lives of abundance, love, success, and prosperity.
Such people have, however, been blessed with the ability to take the circumstances they've been handed and make them into something great.
Our individual realities are colored by perception-delight and despair come from within rather than without. Situations we regard as fortuitous please us while situations we judge inauspicious cause us no end of grief.
Yet if we can look at all we have accomplished without dwelling on our perceived misfortune and make each new circumstance our own, the world as a whole becomes a brighter place.