Waiting for the Next Thing: A Therapist’s Reflection

Happiness can be found in many places

Lately, I’ve been noticing how often I—and many of the people I sit with in therapy—get caught in the belief that happiness lives in the next thing. When I finish this course… when I finally get a break… when I lose the weight… when I figure it all out. There’s a quiet urgency underneath it all, a sense that life hasn’t truly started yet.

It’s something I’ve had to gently confront in myself too. This idea that contentment is conditional. That I’ll exhale once I arrive at some imagined finish line. And yet, in my work as a Gestalt therapist-in-training, I’m learning again and again that the “there” I keep chasing never really arrives. Because life isn’t over there—it’s here, in this moment, in this breath, in this experience.

Gestalt practice invites us to be with what is. Not to fix it, rush it, or bypass it, but to notice it, sit with it, and allow it to unfold. This is uncomfortable at times. It asks me to meet the present moment not as a stepping stone, but as a place worthy of my full presence. It asks me to bring that same invitation into the therapy space: to explore what’s happening now, not just what we wish was happening next.

So I’ve been asking myself and my clients: What if there’s nothing we need to become before we can feel peace? What if we can soften into the now—even if it’s incomplete, imperfect, uncertain—and find that it holds something of value?

This is the ongoing work. To stop outsourcing our wholeness to the future. To remember that happiness doesn’t live in the future. It lives in our capacity to meet ourselves, fully, in the now..