A college student once told me: \"I don't need to be happy—just successful.\"

It's an odd juxtaposition¹. She needn't be happy—\"just successful.\" She places one in opposition to the other.

Students are today's expressions of tomorrow's practices. Their words can be the visible signs of the less visible struggles encountered by us all.

I have a memory from my own undergraduate years of a headline in my campus newspaper: \"Why Aren't We Happy?\" As the headline suggests， we fell short of leading joyful lives. Yet at least happiness was still on the agenda². What underlies³ the tendency of many of us， like my success－seeking student， to give up genuinely trying?

I've often failed to enjoy Sunday because of my schedule on Monday. At bottom， it was simply anticipatory anxiety over the work of the week ahead—fear that there would be unexpected complications or that I would fail to measure up in some way. Usually， when Monday came， I did quite well. Much of what I worried about never happened.

Joy has its own moral underpinning. There's a completeness to joy that does not allow us to exclude⁴ our sense of the person we should be. Pleasure is certainly possible in less-than-honorable actions. But the experience of joy requires more; it is pleasure taken in worthy things.

True joy requires choices that develop into habits that evolve⁵ into character. And that's work we can't delegate.

The essential first step is trying to live a less fearful life—one that avoids collapsing life's possibilities before exploring them. It entails welcoming uncertainty and comfortable incompleteness.

一個大學生曾經告訴我：“我不需要快樂——有成功就足夠了。”

這是一個不同尋常的思想的對比。她不需要快樂——“只要成功”。她把這兩者放在對立的兩極上。

今天的言就是明天的行。學生們的話可以成為一個清晰的標志，指示我們所有人都面臨的、隱晦的掙扎。

記得我在讀大學的時候——校報的一個標題是：“為什么我們不快樂?”正如這個標題暗示的那樣，我們太缺乏能夠帶來快樂生活的能力了。然而至少快樂還在議程里。而我們中的許多人，比如我那一味追求成功的學生，則傾向于坦誠地放棄對快樂的追求，這是為什么呢?

我經常因為下周一的日程安排無法享受星期天。實際上，是提前對未來一周的工作感到焦慮——擔心意想不到的復雜因素或者我在某些方面做得不夠好。但當星期一到來的時候，總是做得相當棒。許多我擔心的事情從未發(fā)生過。

快樂有自己的道德基礎?？鞓返耐暾圆辉试S我們不去考慮自己應該成為什么樣的人。當然，快感也可能存在于那些不那么體面的行為中。但是要體驗快樂就要付出更多，即在那些有價值的事中品嘗快感。

真正的快樂需要選擇，這些選擇可以培養(yǎng)成習慣，而這些習慣可以演變成一種性格。這是我們無法推托的工作。

重要的第一步是努力過一種沒有那么多擔心的生活——使我們避免在探索生活的可能性之前就已經放棄。這要求我們必須適應不確定性，心安理得地接受這種不完整。

注釋：

1. juxtaposition n. （不同的）思想、文化、傳統(tǒng)的對比

2. agenda n. 議事日程

3. underlie v.構成（某人行動、理論等）的基礎；作（某事物）的說明或解釋

4. exclude v. 排除；阻止進入；推托

5. evolve v. 使發(fā)展；使演化