The dictionary offers a simple definition of bliss: complete happiness.

Two words! How hard can that be to attain?

Well, a curmudgeon might ask, if it takes only two words to define, how great can it be?

We worked under the assumption that it’s pretty great.

Why else would National Public Radio correspondent Eric Weiner, a self-proclaimed grump, go searching for it in his book The Geography of Bliss? In explaining his endeavor, Weiner writes: “I roam the world in search of answers to the pressing questions of our time: What are the essential ingredients for the good life? Why are some places happier than others? How are we shaped by our surroundings?”

Oh, Eric. There’s no need to roam the world. We went searching for bliss right here in Kansas City, and it wasn’t that hard to find.

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Happiness for most people begins with the thought: “This is how things ought to be!” Suffering comes with the opposite thought: “Things ought not to be as they are”.

However, we tend to fall into the habit of thinking that we know already how things ought to be or ought not to be.

We identify happiness with fixity instead of accepting life’s natural flow. We become “psychological antiques” — wanting nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing even improved. The stability comes to mean permanence. Permanence, however, is something the soul can have only in God.

Happiness is bliss outwardly directed towards the senses and their world of relativity and change. Bliss is eternal, but happiness is man’s attempt to project bliss into a fleeting and alien environment. In that projection, he forms attachments to things temporal. Happiness, in its pretence of permanence, becomes simply another counterfeit, like pleasure.

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