I’ve always been a glass seven-eighths empty personality. While my mother battled Parkinson’s disease for 18 years, I watched as, in her bouts with depression, she spent a small fortune on clothes, jewelry, books and knick knacks for the house. While these purchases brought her temporary pleasure, they failed to make her happy. Often she returned many of her purchases a week or so later for others. In retrospect, I suspect her habit was symptomatic of her illness.

If it’s true that we often choose our unhappiness, then it can also be said that we can choose to be happy. It’s also true that old habits die hard.

I have much for which to be thankful. I still have good health, a job that pays fairly well in an economic climate the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the Great Depression, and my second novel just launched. And yet I worry about its success. Will this child of mine, born of my imagination and hopes and dreams, be readily accepted by the readers with whom I hope to connect—yes, writers write, in large part, to connect with others.

I find it difficult to choose happiness in this step of publication. Perhaps I fear even more its potential success than I do should the number of sales fall short of my hopes and expectations because, like my mother, I find pleasure in the purchase of a good bottle of scotch or a box of cigars. But I know, from my own experience as well as from hers, that such purchases don’t make me happy.

Happiness, without peace of mind, is just a word, and peace of mind is something that eludes me, as it did my mother. Yet just as I understand that happiness is not a destination, it is a choice, one that I fear for a number of reasons. Am I deserving of happiness? Once achieved, will it disappoint me? Sometimes we hold onto our anger, our losses, our regrets, our pain and heartache as badges of honor, and doesn’t achieving happiness mean we have to let go of these?

It’s not happiness I seek as I progress through my sixth decade, but instead peace of mind. I’m convinced that without peace of mind, happiness is just a word, one whose definition I understand, but whose meaning doesn’t apply in my life.