Working World » The necessity of travel http://workingworldcareers.com Careers in International Education, Exchange, and Development Wed, 09 Sep 2015 14:30:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 The pursuit of happiness http://workingworldcareers.com/2009/06/08/the-pursuit-of-happiness/ http://workingworldcareers.com/2009/06/08/the-pursuit-of-happiness/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:10:59 +0000 Mark Overmann http://workingworldcareers.com/?p=1217 “Happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued,” writes Pico Iyer in a “Happy Days” dispatch from yesterday’s Times. (In a roundabout way, it’s Iyer who’s responsible for me being where I am and doing what I do: his May 2002 essay in Time on the necessity of travel was the inspiration for my graduate school application essay, which began the series of fortuitous accidents that has led me to this point. So thanks, Pico.)

Iyer’s an established journalist and travel writer now, but what does he remember of his life and career at age 29, an age I’m about to turn in a matter of days?

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”

Iyer doesn’t ask us to take the same road or approach to life or career as he did—he only implores that we look for our peace and passion not by struggling for certainty, but rather by listening to ourselves.

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