Exploring Happiness #64- The Best Of Everything Poem by June Stepansky

Striving for the best
is continuously seductive.

It is a path that leads
always upward
toward ultimately
unreachable horizons,
predicated on “ I want”
rather than on “I need.”

A predictable obsolescence
which frequently exacts a payment
more costly than
the desired rewards.


To pursue the best of everything is a seductive goal.
Niccolo Machiavelli said, “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach, we are never satisfied.”
There will always be something new and more desirable being discovered, making what we thought was the best this month become obsolete by next month.
We all want to have a good life—a life that is healthy and comfortable and attractive, but each of us must decide for ourselves how good the “good life” needs to be to provide us with the contentment and the happiness that we all desire.

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Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage,
or squirrels in a chain, ambitious
men still climb and climb with great
labor and incessant anxiety, but
never reach the top.
Robert Burton