Post-Curfew Post

Somebody just posted a fortune cookie quote on Facebook that was something to the effect of:

"Stop searching for happiness. It will find you."

Bullcrap.

The quest for happiness is not a passive one. One will not be able to obtain happiness if they just sit there waiting for it to come and embrace them in a bear hug of cheesiness. Rather, happiness is a business, an art, a final project that none of your group shows up for. The quest for happiness is indeed a very active one.

Take, for example, the quest for academic fulfillment, often mistaken as a quest for a 4.0 GPA. This is a journey that is not only painful but also impossible without taking an active role. Throughout my Junior year of high school, I pointedly improved the way I learned. In doing so, I realized that something had been missing from school. Something I had left behind in fifth grade. Excitement. Initiative. The need to learn, to take the class not for the grade, but for the material. I looked back at elementary school days, and realized how much happier I was. Not because of how ignorant I was, but the opposite. I knew things. I wanted to know things. I wanted to be the best. Alas, I was a minimalist. A fine ailment for a care-free child, but one to be feared when entering the hormone-sack prison we call middle school. For years, this disease carried itself with me. Only during the later part of this school year did I realize that my problem was that I had forgotten to be active, that my own mediocrity was because I wasn't allowing myself to be anything more than mediocre. As soon as that clicked, I found the last bit of junior year, despite being surrounded by hindrances, to be bliss. I had come full circle.

Cheesy teen romance is another great place to find the fruits of activity. So many foolish young people expect their one true love to fall from the sky. Nope. That's not how it works. As counterintuitive as it sounds, a good relationship needs to be based on a good deal of scheming. Let's face it. There's hardly a couple in the world that just "fell in love". Understandably, there are a few couples who have a mutual base of loveliness from the start, but by and large, there's a large deal of effort on part of one side to get noticed by the other. Whole epics could be written describing the arduous task of convincing somebody you exist. This is the effort taken to find happiness. Of course, there will be failures, but that's for a future post. The point remains that effort is necessary for any good relationship to begin to exist. An effort that carries on through the relationship, along with the rewards.

I'd love to write more, but I was supposed to be asleep 42 minutes ago.


Peace out, readers.