The carrot is a lie.

     The proverbial carrot that all of us are continuing to chase, that is held just out of our reach on a string, in front of us, can, on the surface, keep us motivated. However, I have found that the carrot is much like "happiness". We pursue happiness vigorously, hoping that one day we will reach that goal of being content with our lives. The problem with this pursuit is that "achieving happiness" is an illusion. Once we think we have reached that final destination of being satisfied with things, with goals, with our very lives, we find that there is MORE that we want, MORE that we "need" to truly be happy. This is an never ending cycle of disappointment. For many of us, the more we have, the more we want to have. We become unsatisfied with our attainments, because there is always something bigger or better, ahead of us, greater than what we have attained. It's similar to the saying that states: "Once I was finally able to make ends meet, someone moved the ends."
     The key to all of this is to realize that "happiness" is not something we need to "pursue", but something we just need to feel, something we just need to realize we have already, realizing the good things in our lives and be grateful for them. We truly all do have something in our lives for which to be thankful, even if it's a small thing. If we can recognize, appreciate, and realize that we can be happy right where we are, right now, where we are in life, at this very second- the maddening pursuit will end. I am certainly not suggesting that we shouldn't strive to be a better person today than we were the day before, but if we could just learn to be grateful for this moment, discover the good things in our lives that are happening right now, that carrot that is dangling in front of us, will be seen as what it really is- and that is that it is a fallacy, a lie. If you can visualize a person who is riding the burrow (the burrow being us) and how that person riding us is holding that stick with the dangling carrot on a string, in front of our faces, that is ALWAYS just out of reach, maybe this will help illustrate how the carrot truly is a lie.