The Pursuit

After traveling to several countries and having the honor to live in New Zealand for a year, I feel that I have been presented a gift; a relic along the seashore. This gift is the gift of perspective. To see and experience how other cultures live, how they live along side each other as citizens, humans, neighbors. My Americanized version of life has been taken a part and then reassembled with new eyes because of these different perspectives. 

You do realize there is an entire world out there right? Besides the one where you, reader, now comfortably sit in your easy chair with a pantry stocked full of food. The more you experience more of life, the world and other cultures - the more you realize you know nothing at all. The more you realize there's more to life than a comfortable house, job, chair etc. Life wasn't meant to be comfortable. 

However, being an American entails some sense of responsibility; to your country, to yourself as an individual, and to other Americans. Whether you know it or not, compared to many parts of the world, you are privileged to be an American. In the Declaration of Independence, there is a phrase that strikes me; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

As an American, as a human being, you have the right to pursue Happiness. 

Pursue. Do you know what that word means? It means to follow, to strive, to gain, to chase, seek to attain or accomplish. But, many Americans chase or pursue that happiness in areas that always fail. Money, sex, power, success (by American standards), clothes, drugs, body image.... 

Let me tell you, I have looked into the eyes of beggars in Italy, poverty-stricken children in Mexico, the simplistic lives of school children in Thailand, laid back New Zealanders with small lives and little drive in life - and I have seen happiness. 

Some of the happiest people I have met do not have much. 

I met a Canadian in Thailand. He was on the back of an Elephant and so was I, and my family and I talked to him as the magnificent beast slowly walked around the most beautiful garden I had ever seen. He quit his comfortable job and was traveling the world.

I met a middle-aged woman who was kicked out of her home in her early teens, just because her parents didn't like her. She had the reading level of a first grader, couldn't drive, never had a career - but she worked with so much zeal, had an extremely compassionate heart and read the Bible every morning; slowly, articulately, word by word. Her face perpetually glowed with joy. 

I met a three-year-old girl on a busy Minneapolis street. With dirt smeared on her face and a messy hairdo she seemed like any other toddler; but her and her family were homeless. She lived and slept in a stroller in her little pink T-shirt. But when my sister and I brought her food in a couple of grocery bags, she ran to us screaming, laughing and smiling - overflowing with happiness and joy. 

I also met a CEO who gave up his dreams to become an artist and focused on business and marketing instead. He lived in an office, interacted little with his employees, and scolded his interns twice for not having the overhead light on over our desks. He had it all, in the worldly sense.

Our pursuit of happiness should never be to get to the highest level of success or to obtain materialistic things. In the end, those things matter little. Find what makes you happy, not content or comfortable, but rather fulfilled and joyful - and do it. Live always in the pursuit of something greater than yourself.