It has been said many times that while we have the right to pursue happiness, not the right to guaranteed happiness. Most of the time when people say this, they're being snide, trying to "get someone off their ass" or whatever. It's never meant as a nice statement.
Except that, it is a nice statement. It's a good statement, a strong statement.
You see, if we were guaranteed happiness, it would be through no action of our own. Happiness would just happen, like they would send it in the mail along with your SSI check or something. Or government cheese. Yup, here's your monthly government cheese and your bucket of happiness.
But the idea of pursuing happiness is far better. This puts the responsibility for our happiness in our hands. This isn't just a semantics game either. Fundamentally, our happiness, like our safety, is ours to have or not to have. It is up to us and within our power to find.
Okay, I'm not saying that you can be happy all the time. That's just....well, creepy. And there are certainly moments when no happiness can or even should be found. However, for the rest of the time, your misery is your choice.
An example:
When I was a wee child, my grandparents lived about 12 miles from the nearest town with larger grocery stores. My grandmother hated this and complained every day, seriously, every day, about how how she was isolated from civilization and they should move to the town. Around the early 80s, they did move to said town. And she was . . . absolutely no happier. Instead of enjoying all of the advantages she had wanted from being in town, now she was miserable because she was away from all of her old friends and the town was too populated.
From that day on, every day, she would complain about how she wished they never moved. She wanted to go back where she was. She painted a blissful and beautiful metal portrait of her time on the farm and contrasted that with all of the problems (many of which she exaggerated) about living in town.
She chose to be miserable. Both locations had advantages and disadvantages. Instead of looking at the advantages and finding ways how to work around the disadvantages, she chose to be unhappy and sour about both experiences. And, honestly, she could have been living anyway, even Happytown of Blissland and she still would have found reasons to hate it.
As for me, I don't want to be unhappy. I know sometimes my meds can't fight the brain-nasties and sometimes shit justs sucks, but in all those other times of my life, I want to be happy. I choose to be happy. And I am going to blog about ways to get to this happiness, as an ongoing study.
Yup, this is me, pursuin some happiness.
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