Happiness, oh how great and mighty and wonderful, but elusive you are! How we crave you, want you, desire you! How we search the whole world for a little piece of you, willing to sell our souls for you. But you just dangle in front of us, like a carrot on a string, at the end of a stick, always in front but never in our grasp.
How often, when we do have you, do we find you as a sacrificial offering on the altars of the high and mighty one as appeasement for the sake of others. Haven't we done enough to deserve you? Why do we have to sacrifice you for that others? Don't we have the right to happiness? Why are we scoffed at, looked upon with shame and disdain when we put ours ahead of others? Why are we called selfish and heartless? What's wrong with wanting you to ourselves?
Tough we may seek out the pleasures of the flesh, the senses, the being, it still leaves us with a wanting, a longing, like a hole that's has temporarily been plugged, that will spring a leak at any moment. These may satisfy our immediate craving but they leave us with a sense of guilt from the indulgence, a temporary fix.
Tough we often block you, lock you, hold you down in the deepest recesses of our being, we need you. How often have we equated our share of you to the share of others, never truly understanding that we are in fact sacrificing you. In other words we are never truly happy for ourselves cause we killed you for others.
All through our live we try to make others happy, as a child our parents and all through our growing years. Happiness for us then would have been being better than the best, be the neighbours envy, parents pride, trying to stay ahead of the rat race, always on the top. And then we begin to earn to ensure we keep the home fires burning and keeping the spouse, the children and the boss happy, never truly having you to ourselves.
We live in constant envy, whether it is for good food, good clothes, better life, better grades, better looks, cushy jobs, higher salaries. But in the bargain we squander our chances with you. Money and all the pleasures of the world can only buy the happiness of the temporary kind. Even then when we chance to look back of time gone by we wished we would have taken the maximum benefits of having you in our lives. But then this is never possible, we can try to relive the days gone by but can never bring them back.
We need you for ourselves cause when we have you for ourselves can others benefit from it. Happiness begets happiness. Happiness grows from the seeds we sow in ourselves, providing shelter from the sun for all those who benefit from the shade we provide.
We need you to find the peace within ourselves. Cause when we have you, we find contentment, a sense of completeness, of wellbeing and of confidence that goes a long way in overcoming any odds that have been stacked against us. But most importantly you show us that we are capable of caring for ourselves, no longer dependent on others, no longer placing our reason for happiness in the hands of others. Thus making us self-reliant and strong.
God forbid if we may ever loose you, either of our own doing or that of others, we will find ourselves hurtling down an endless rabbit hole, into the darkness of a bottomless pit. Loosing all sense of hope and sanity, and a sense of being and time. Reminiscing of the happy days gone by, wondering where did they go? what happened to the man you had once known, could you be that man again.
So it's important that when we have you, we treat you with care and respect and not take you for granted. We got to be alert towards you and make sure you don't loose you.
So there's no guilt in prioritising our happiness over that of others, cause after all, a little Happiness never killed nobody, so why shouldn't we want some self-happiness for ourselves.
