Although good fortune may be needed for happiness, it appears that what is essential to the good life is always available. Thornton Wilder pointed this out in writing about Our Town: "I have tried to find a value above price for the smallest events in our daily life."
That daily life is the setting and stage for our own drama. We come to know that we fail or succeed according to how we handle the ordinary, commonplace events going on around us. It is in apparently trivial events that we most clearly show who we are.
— George Sheehan, Going the Distance