may edition 2020
May You Be Happy
Wake up, grab a cup of coffee, get ready, and proceed with your day. Meet your fellow classmates or coworkers. Go ahead, sit down, and start working. Or at least, pretend you are. Lose your mind amid daily issues, approaching deadlines, and the inevitable chit-chatting so many people wish you stopped. Take some time to eat, maybe have another coffee, and after some more work go back home. Hope there is no traffic. Finally, when you get home, do whatever you feel like doing unless you are under any obligations – we all are. Get to bed and close your eyes. What do you see?
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Darkness. Nothing but obscure, overwhelming black. You may start seeing wild colors that appear to come from nowhere. It is pretty strange, but you decide to fall asleep. Great, now – finally – you can start dreaming. Lose yourself to all your dearest aspirations, your impossible ideal scenarios. Maybe it is a place, a person, a job, a salary. Give up all of your limitations, and start feeling your lips curve into a smile. Those mere minutes you are in the limbo between alertness and unconscious sleep, that precious time you can be alone with your own thoughts, that slight state of delicious calm before you fall into the deepest workings of your mind – hold on to it for as long as you can. For when you let it go, you’ll have to wait another 24 hours to be happy again.
Another entire day of repetitions, worries, and emotions to reach that precious moment when nothing else but the realization of your truest passions becomes real. Only wait another day to cherish that instant of pure happiness so you can go ahead with the other day. The other week. The other month. For the rest of your life. Why though? Most people – if not all – laugh incessantly or feel intense excitement many times a day. As far as common language can tell, you are happy. Should you doubt, it takes no more than showing the smiling pictures in your camera roll to let others convince you about it. Yet deep down there’s something about it that does not feel completely true. Not that you are in the midst of depression – it is only a natural human feeling. This empty hole, despite how small it could be, is what drives us ahead. It is what makes us dream during the day and cherish awakeness during the night.
Yearning for the unreachable, longing to get what seems the farthest away from us: this is the emptiness you may feel, from where a terribly driving force to the human spirit comes from. The dreams and aspirations that storm around it have such an impact on daily life it becomes scary. Though you would wish you were chasing after them every day, perhaps you end up replacing them for daily activities. Perhaps, this is why it is only when you close our eyes, isolating from any harsh reality that may bring real consequences, when you are brave enough to face emptiness. Yet to our surprise, once we do what we find is an ephemeral sense of pleasurable fulfillment. Dreaming, we start to reach our impossibles, we get every time closer in the race to reach happiness, and we realize it is worth the distress. We, however, seem to forget it as soon as we open our eyes again.
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But it does not have to be this way. If happiness is the impossible, then may the impossible become your daily life. It will take courage, strength, and resilience. You will have to strive to get even to the first step. I can also guarantee you this impossible just keeps growing and growing as you seem to get closer and closer. But isn’t this what makes life the most interesting, unique experience? Getting up each day knowing you will never cease in the pursuit of fulfillment. Knowing every minute alive is worth it.
Not having to wait until night to bring a genuine smile to your face.
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So, may each and every day of your life chase after what that voice inside you desperately drives you to do. May you enjoy every single moment of achievement in the realization of what you yearn for the most. May you smile both through your days and nights. May you be happy.
By Alejandra Durán 10B