“Follow your bliss,” says Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, implying that bliss is happiness. But…
…Happiness is not a destination.
Happiness is a state of being. It is not in the past or in the future. A state of being is Now (with a capital “N”). Not a second later, nor a second in time earlier. And in an instant, it is gone — only to be instantly replaced.
Exactly Where You Need to Be
From Campbell’s work with the Upanishads, a collection of Vedic Sanskrit texts, he came to the conclusion that:
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
And happiness is the feeling that you are living, at least for the moment, in a state of being that is exactly where you need to be.