Sadness

Where does this sadness come from? Of course in the lives of every adult there are some things to feel sad about, opportunities lost, love denied. But the sadness I feel is more powerful and more pervasive than these events alone would provoke. Even when other events in my life might be regarded as more than compensating for these disappointments and losses, the act of counting one's blessings does not dissipate the sadness. Nothing, it seems, can compensate for what might have been. What has been lost? I have pondered about finding this sadness in me when I reached a point in my life where all the disappointments and losses I had experienced had provoked in fact to be very beneficial. I was now leading the kind of life  I had dreamed of when  I was an adolescent, I write, I travel with family and friends, our own delightful home, a good  income, and healthier than i had ever been. As well, I had been successful in excluding from my life quite a number of things which I did not want to do and which I would, when I was younger, have felt obliged to do. I had also relieved myself of the burden of worrying about whether people approved of me. Most of the time I felt extremely happy, but every now and then I would find myself feeling sad. I thought about this and I thought about this daydreams, when I was young I imagined that as I get older
I daydream less and less. As adolescent I had dreamed of many things and fell in love with many different people, but with each passing year, I thought, the range of possibilities gets less and less, so that in older age there is nothing to dream about.
I know now that this is not the case. I go on telling myself stories to comfort myself and to view the future with hope. So I still daydream a lot, and these dreams, like the dreams of my youth, are about wanting everything and getting everything. I want to have it all. My sadness is because I do not have it all.