“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.” – Willa Cather, Le Lavandou.

I am not good at predicting what will make me happy or understanding happiness when it comes. I’ve been afraid of things all of my life that never happened, and found joy when I least expected it and never predicted it or saw it coming.

I’m reading a book by Daniel Gilbert called “Stumbling on Happiness,” and it is inspiring me to think about happiness and my own efforts to find it.

This is not a how-to-be-happy book, instead, it is a wise and smartass look at what science has to tell us about how well the human brain can imagine its future and about how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy.

Gilbert is direct and unpretentious. He doesn’t promise happiness, as so many self-help books do, he can promise nothing but blood, sweat, and tears.

There is nothing in his book, he says, that will tell anyone anything useful about how to be happy. “Those books,” he writes in his introduction, “are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you’ve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.”

Gilbert’s book is useful and funny. He’s right. He doesn’t tell anybody how to be happy, but he does explain why we sometimes are and sometimes aren’t. And why there isn’t all that much we can do about it.

The puzzle is why we know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become, says Gilbert. We are the only creatures on earth who get to make so many choices about how we will live, where we will live, what our work will be, and to pursue what we think will make us happy.

And most of the time, most of us are anything but happy, we are exhausted and discouraged from trying. We are not good at imagining our own happiness.

We are always trying to foresee what will make us happy, but our visions of happiness are not very reliable or successful. Just look at the divorce rate, hovering around 50 percent for years.

I love the idea of stumbling into happiness. When I consciously set out to be happy, I never was. I thought you had to imagine it and fight for it.

One day, I stumbled on a farm for sale in a remote town in upstate New York. I  bought it on sight; I told everyone I would be happy there, I knew it was my destiny.

I could not explain to my horrified first wife what I expected to do there or find there, or why I could justify moving 300 miles away from my family for a year or so. All I knew was that it would make me happy..

My wife rarely came up to the farm, which she disliked intensely, and neither did my daughter. A few years later, we were divorced. My time there was exciting but anything but happy.

Several years later, I was no longer married and breaking down and ran into an artist and house restorer I fell in love with. There were only a handful of people in the town, certainly no one I expected to share my life with.

To my shock, she fell in love with me.

I never imagined or suspected such a thing. And neither did she. A decade later, we still often look at each other, scratch our heads, and wonder aloud, “how did this happen?”

We have yet to come up with an answer. Gilbert’s book might offer some clues.

Here I am, happy most of the time, more so than ever. I quite literally stumbled into happiness. Maria makes me happy, so does my work with the Army Of Good, my blog, my photographs, my dogs, donkeys, and farm.

The thing about happiness is becoming simpler to me. You just have to let it happen. There are forces in the world that are much bigger than me, I had to stop playing God.

The mistake we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are problematic, writes Gilbert, a Harvard University psychologist.

“They too have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight,” he writes.

I have noticed that the people who buy those how-to-be-happy books are, almost by definition, not.

I find happiness only when I blindly stumble into it, or when it stumbles into me. It is very liberating to understand that happiness is rarely a conscious choice, but an accident, a matter of luck, fate, and happenstance. It is not a matter of foresight or calculation.

A wise man wrote that when we stopped worrying about money, we will have plenty. I think he was joking. Another wise man – me – wrote that happiness isn’t a two-way thing.

It isn’t a question of me and happiness out looking for one another. That is not happiness, that is a Hollywood movie from Disney Studios.

Instead, I blindly stumble and bumble through life, and once in a great while, I run into happiness, which is usually dozing in some basement or doorstep. We find one another, or sometimes, never do.

When it works, it really works. When it doesn’t work, it really hurts.

This realization has freed me to be saner and calmer and more productive in my life.

Since I can’t foresee what makes me happy, I can simply live.

I’m just like Beavis and Butthead, who understand that because they know nothing, they are free.