07 Jun Questing: The Happiness of Pursuit
Many of us believe happiness will come when we achieve.
And to some extent, it will. Accomplishment DOES contribute to happiness BUT so too does happiness contribute to accomplishment!
Which raises the question about whether it’s the journey or the destination that makes us happiest?
Well, it’s a bit of both. And this Psychology Today article by Gregg Levoy touches on maximising thriving via novelty seeking …
KEY POINTS
- A hunger for novelty is at the heart of the exploratory urge and often our own restlessness.
- We don’t just crave security and certainty, but their opposite—passion, spontaneity, novelty, discovery.
- The call of the road doesn’t go away. If it isn’t answered or even acknowledged, it can shape-shift into disquietude or outburst.

Source: Ekrulila/Pexels
When he was in his 20s, travel writer Bruce Chatwin was an art expert at Sotheby’s, a job he found increasingly distasteful. One morning, he woke up blind. The doctor said there was nothing organically wrong with him. “You’ve been looking too closely at pictures,” he said. “Why don’t you swap them for some long horizons.”
So he went to Africa. His eyes recovered by the time he got to the airport.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that all our miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone, but surely some of our miseries derive from too much time sitting alone in a room, legs pulsating under the desk, running in place.
Our orbits can so easily narrow down to the use of a few beaten paths, a handful of faculties, the company of the same people and the same ideas, the cadaverous light of the computer and television, a small wedge of experience that excludes whole universes of pleasure and whole continents of people, while the larger life that’s always out there accuses us of mere contentment.
But there’s a part of each of us that inevitably grows weary of the status quo, hungry for a challenge or new horizon, which feels born to run—to move, explore, experiment, travel, climb, create, investigate, invent, pioneer, and discover. To grow. The world, and our own individual lives, owes its progress and passion to the spirit of questing—even restlessness—within us.
In her book New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, Winifred Gallagher refers to “neophilia” …
… keep reading the full & original article HERE