Quote of the Day: Margaret Lee Runbeck on Life & Wisdom

Notice she chooses “manner of traveling” rather than “way of living” or “method of coping.” “Manner” is social and practiced; it’s how you conduct yourself when no one is grading you. “Traveling” implies motion without guaranteed arrival times, detours, delays, and weather. Together, the phrase refuses the fantasy that happiness is a pinned location on a map, something you reach once the right promotion lands or the hard season ends. “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.”

This is a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of deferring joy. We make contentment a conditional clause: once the debt is gone, once the body looks a certain way, once the house is finally organized. The trouble is that outcomes are slippery. When happiness is tied to a finish line, it becomes structurally scarce, always one more milestone away, always vulnerable to the next setback.

Runbeck’s framing relocates happiness from the scoreboard to the stance. The journey still contains bills, conflict, and disappointment; “traveling” doesn’t romanticize potholes. It simply insists that your inner climate can’t be outsourced to circumstances. A practiced manner, attention to small goodness, gratitude that isn’t naïve, the choice to stay curious, builds resilience because it gives you something to carry when plans collapse. It also restores humanity: you notice fellow travelers, offer patience, accept help, and find meaning in ordinary exchanges.

That insistence on lived practice fits Margaret Lee Runbeck, a 20th-century author whose influential writing paired keen observation with advocacy for social causes. She understood that a better world is built less by grand announcements than by daily conduct.

On this December Monday, when calendars pressure us toward year-end verdicts, her line is a corrective: treat happiness as a discipline you can rehearse today, even in the crowded, imperfect middle of your life.