Do you ever just feel — lost..?
Like you know that you should be working hard at school, focusing in your classes. You should try to make your family proud through your efforts to become one of the great names of your society. You should be having great experiences and be making all these great friends and have a vibrant social media account full of colorful images of self-expression.
Do you have all of that though? Many view what I listed, including other variables, as their goal to happiness. Their ever ongoing Pursuit of Happiness. Doesn’t that sound familiar? It is made immortal in the America culture which puts it along with Life and Liberty as unalienable human rights. Everyday we wake up, trying to catch our happiness. If we all want to be happy, why is it so out of our grasp?
This goal is attainable but many of us succumb to anxiety, depression and a myriad of other issues. We are just so distracted with a cacophony of being told what will make us feel good. Whether it be a high salary, a great body with abs and a D cup rack, that “OMG goals!” love life or those frequent weekend adventures; when you don’t have all of these you are made to feel like "you aren’t doing enough with your life." We hear that so often and this mortal truth is thrown everywhere.
If we were immortal, we wouldn’t care about anything because everything can be achieved with infinite time. However, the truth of our lives is that we die and that pushes us to make many of our choices. It is the source of human anxiety, to leave this world feeling like we wasted our chance to be something we wanted to be. Even worse, every action we ever commit cannot be undone. I have friends who take an hour to pick something on a menu, because once they pick that plate they cannot change it. Once they commit, they eternally wonder if the McNuggets would have been better than the Big Mac.
What I think the goal should be is to achieve our own personal legend. It’s this concept from a book I just read, The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo. It’s an incredible story about the journey of this young Spanish shepherd who realizes that his destiny lies in a journey to see the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
He was always afraid of moving on from place to place because change is terrifying. He finds love in one city and then moves to the next finding wealthy. He wants to stop but finds the courage to move on, again finding a girl in a desert town but this time realizing it is his soulmate. The boy wants to stop again, afraid of dying in the desert, but he decides to push through and makes it to the pyramids. He finds himself there and realizes at that point he can die happy and wants nothing else because he has seen the most beautiful thing in the world and found true love.
We all have that journey to take, but fear stops us. Finding ourselves and achieving happiness and contentment is possible, we just have to be brave enough to take the steps to be who we are meant to be; never letting complacency be our motivation to stop and be idle.
