Is it a goal? A place to arrive at? Or is it a process?
Can you recognize it when you feel it? Or is it easier to remember rather than to recognize and experience in the moment?
Do you think that to appreciate happiness, you need moments where you have a lack of happiness? What is a good balance?
Would you want to live a life where you are happy most of the time? Is that even possible?
There are no right or wrong answers here, just open ended questions.
I personally think if I treat happiness as a destination, I will never get there. So the focus becomes cultivating awareness and acceptance of the present moment, as much as possible.
But a calm, stoic, awareness doesn't necessarily mean happiness, but it's distant cousin contentment.
Still, I think being in a continuous state of calm contentment isn't ideal either. It has to peppered with spikes of happiness and other emotions, even the ones that don't feel good.
Lastly, I think evolution has designed us to not be content. Evolution rewarded those of our ancestors who ventured out of the cave, and who were hyperaware of predators, and constantly planning for obtaining security (in the form of food and shelter).
So, contentment requires bypassing of the evolutionary neural rhythms; one way of doing that is through meditation. To train yourself to be aware of your feelings, thoughts and desires, observing them and acting upon them with careful consideration. I think that when you do that, you become something beyond the monkey mind evolution created.
A small fact that becomes apparent when you train yourself to arrive at contentment through meditation is that contentment is purely an internally generated state, regardless of what is happening outside of you. Even if your arm is on fire, you can choose to enter a content state. This realization is one of the most powerful things in the world, in my opinion.
Anyway, as the new year approaches, I wish everyone a little more awareness and cultivation of happiness. May you be happier then you were this past year.