Though we dedicate ourselves to its pursuit, allowing it to define our relationships, self-image, and future plans, it doesn’t care for our well-being.
It mocks us, forever slipping through our grip as it leads us farther away from peace. It towers over us, ruling over every screen we encounter throughout our day.
It turns us against each other, forcing us to view friends and strangers only for what they have worth taking. Though we worship it, happiness considers us as fools without power, cowards afraid of challenge, and treats us as such.
As we are told we should do, we start to live for happiness. We begin to hate our own reflection. We gorge ourselves on what we should have the sense to avoid. For happiness, we lose interest in our environment, only settling for the next version. For happiness, we believe we can exist as the wind, toying with others and claiming attachments to immediately leave them.
For happiness, we are miserable because we are not the wind. We are the grass in the field, trees of the forest, searching for roots where we can exist freely while also having a home. Happiness would have us abandon our roots the instant they fail to satisfy us. But nothing can do that completely. Our roots still represent the best chance to lead an admirable life, but happiness would have us value moments over a dependable future. Happiness drags us into its current, ripping away whatever roots we could have had, to have us move without direction.
Despite how we view it, happiness keeps us eternally running, blind and addicted. It gives us brief tastes of a feast it could never truly provide, and that is enough for us to never question its flaws. Without happiness, we remember how to love who we are and that which surrounds us. Without happiness, we focus on the messages we wish to believe in. We sympathize with one another and appreciate the gentle silence. We can smile even in the darkness.
Happiness is necessary, but it is not an ideal to bow to. Happiness provides us blazing passion and colorful noise, but those who would live for it only melt away within it and become deaf to themselves. Happiness must be kept in the corner of our vision, a portion of our dream rather than the dream itself, as we come to understand ourselves. It only allows itself to be captured when we stop pursuing it to develop our own opinions.
As we strengthen our grip on what we want to become in the world, we gain the power to hold on to happiness. Though we still fail to cling to it, it continues to return to us drawn in by our self-confidence. Happiness must be allowed to come and go, never owning our thoughts, as we determine our own identity.
To be fulfilled, dedicate yourself to a goal and know the journey will at times be more of a nightmare than a dream. Take pride in the necessary failure, solitude, and sorrow as they refine your character into someone worthy of happiness’s respect. Understand, the complete pursuit of happiness narrows our view, rather than opening our world.
Live for your own contentment, never obeying happiness built on the ever-changing words of others. In the end, those who aim only for happiness miss in the worst possible way. They undervalue themselves and surrender their dreams. For those who aim to become all they can be, happiness finds them.
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