Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Lee Runbeck

Runbeck’s line works because it punctures a deeply American hallucination: that life is a series of checkpoints, and happiness is the trophy you collect when you’ve optimized hard enough. By refusing the “state to arrive at,” she dismantles the promise baked into career ladders, self-help mantras, and the whole culture of deferred living. The grammar is the point. “State” implies permanence, possession, a stable address. “Manner” suggests behavior, texture, a choice you rehearse daily. Happiness becomes less like a destination on Google Maps and more like how you hold the steering wheel.

The subtext is quietly corrective, almost parental: stop bargaining with the future. People often treat joy as a wage paid retroactively for suffering - finish the degree, endure the job, survive the week, then you’re allowed to feel good. Runbeck calls that bluff. If happiness is “traveling,” then it’s not something the world grants you when conditions improve; it’s something you practice while conditions are imperfect, shifting, occasionally brutal. That’s not naive cheerfulness. It’s an insistence on agency at the level most advice avoids: attention, posture, interpretation.

Context matters too. As an author rather than a politician or preacher, Runbeck speaks from the narrative arts, where meaning is made in scenes, not endings. Her metaphor honors process over plot twist. It also anticipates a modern anxiety: we’re surrounded by “arrival” imagery - goals, milestones, upgrades - and yet chronically feel like we’re not there. The quote doesn’t sell you a finish line. It offers a method.