Patience

Sometimes it's hard to have that virtue. Especially when everything's going right. You get excited about life and can see only good tidings on the horizon and nothing can bring you down. You've had that feeling. I've had it too. It's a nice feeling. Problem is, it's when that feeling hits that your guard has to be at its highest.
It's easy to forget things when you're happy. Easy to leave something out, leave something undone, un-taken-care-of, in our haste to fully enjoy our bliss. Yet, it seems, to be in full enjoyment of our bliss, is to be in danger of losing it to our own carelessness.
Case and point:
Yesterday was a good day. I managed to not fail a math test. I was finally able to buy some textbooks. I was looking forward to a friend's birthday party. I had completed and turned in all my Tech Talk material four hours before deadline. Life was good.
Then came 5 p.m.
I was at work, daydreaming about being off work, when I got a call from one of my editors saying there was a problem with the school server and my paper had mysteriously been deleted. Not a big deal, really. I would just have to go back after work and re-save.
20 minutes later, while I was thinking about all the fun times I was in for after work, I realized that I'd accidentally been doing only half of the task I was assigned for the day. Which meant I would spend the rest of my time there fixing the mess I'd made instead of progressing as I should have been.
Two hours later I'd fixed the mess and called it a day at work. I made it back to the journalism office only to find that, in my haste to escape for the day, I had not saved a backup of my article anywhere. My only copy had been on the server. And the server had eaten it. And it was gone.
At the time, this was catastrophic to my mood for the day. In all honesty, it's not that big of a deal since I'm fairly certain I can recreate what was lost before the next deadline.
All of this, though, could easily have been avoided by simply paying attention to more than my own joy.
Of course, when happiness comes along we are (most of us) obliged to accept it, to try to keep it around as long as possible. In my experience, though, the best way to keep it around is to not become lost in it. Experience it, yes. Revel in it, yes. But life is more than happiness. And to forsake the rest of life, of reality for the sake of sustaining one's own happiness is to banish said joy for a time.
Worry not, though, for it almost always returns. And, in most cases, to a person wiser in its ways, and less willing to take it for granted.