The Pursuit of Happiness

I don’t much believe in the pursuit of happiness.  The reason is you never seem to get there, hence pursuit.  I think happiness is what you make it.  If you spend all your time waiting for people or things to make you happy, you’ll spend your life in pursuit.  However, if you take pleasure in the little things everyday like grinding your own wheat into flour to make homemade bread, that’s good for your soul.

I was once told that I sucked all the happiness out of the world leaving none for anyone else.  I wondered how this could be since my happiness was in my soul not somewhere outside of me in the world.  Your life is what you make of it and you can chose to be miserable and see misery in everything or you can choose to enjoy the little things each day that make your spirit soar.  I think in the end, it’s a life made up of the little things and your pure enjoyment of them that true happiness is found.

I didn’t come at this naturally.  I mean, like all Americans we memorized the basic tenants of our constitution of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and we’ve spent over 200 years engaged in that pursuit only to find out it’s a figment of our imagination.  You cannot pursue your own self.   If you chose happiness then you’re happy that’s that.  There’s no pursuit.  No searching. No pot at the end of the rainbow where riches and thus happiness lies.  

Once you come to realize you - like Dorothy in the wizard of oz who had the power within her to get home all along - control all the happiness any human being could ever want, you can stop searching.  It’s a choice, as simple as that.  I’m not being pollyanish, I’m being a realist albeit an optimist.  Choose right now that from here on out you will be happy and you will be amazed how happiness will come to you like a magnet.  Just like those who choose to be miserable, attract misery.  It’s some strange universal law, the law of attraction.

I’m happy and will continue to enjoy grinding my own wheat, kneading my own bread, a bubble bath with candles, a homemade dinner on a weeknight.  The world be damned if I’m hated for it.  I say go find your own happiness, stop trying to take mine.