Casper Daily Tribune

Landscape of Life
In the writings of the wisest men you would find some such observation as this:
Care should not be taken to build the happiness of life upon a "broad foundation"-not to require a great many things in order to be happy. Happiness on such a foundation is most easily undermined; it offers many more opportunities for accidents; and accidents are always happening.
Our life, it has been observed, is like a journey on which, as we advance, the landscape takes a different view from that which it presented at first, and changes again, as we come nearer.
This is just what happens-especially with our wishes.
We often find something else, even something better than we were looking for: and what we look for, we often find on a very different path from that on which we began a vain search.
Again, instead of finding, as we expected, pleasure, happiness, joy, we often acquire experience, insight, knowledge-a real and permanent blessing.
"Men of any worth or value, soon come to see that they are in the hands of Fate, and gratefully submit to be moulded by its teachings." Schopenhauer opines.
"They recognize that the fruit of life is experience, and not happiness: they become accustomed and content to exchange hope for insight: and in the end they can say, with Petrarch, that all they care for is to learn,
It may even be that they to some extent still follow their old wishes and aims, trifling with them, as it were, for the sake of appearances all the while really and seriously looking for nothing but instruction: a process which lends them an air of genius, a trait of something contemplative and sublime."
In their search for gold, the alchemists discovered other things- gun powder, china, medicines, the laws of nature.
There is a sense in which we are all alchemists.