Friday, October 5, 2007

Pursuit of Happiness...


“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.”

The above statement comes from an excerpt inside the pages of, ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book, along with its author, was recently featured on an Oprah Winfrey Show.

The book has reached far and wide…a phenomenon among women throughout the world.

I haven’t read the book just yet; however, in reading the first few pages, and delving into her interview she gave to Oprah, her personal agony is blatantly apparent.

Her personal, inner turmoil is revealed through her words, not only verbally, but within the pages of her book.

She begins with writing and speaking about a place of uncertainty in her life; what she really wanted, wasn’t what she really wanted at all.

I suppose in this country, there is a conditional element to ‘happiness’; we’re conditioned to think that when you grow up, you get married, by a home, have kids, and live happily ever after. However, as you probably already know, that doesn’t happen too often in the ‘real world’ where I live, where you live…I think ultimately, we have to fight for the things we want…and really, are the things we want, really the things we need?

As Elizabeth said, as noted above, ‘Happiness is the consequence of personal effort’; we strive SO HARD to attain what someone else thinks we need to be happy, when all along, we only desire to be ourselves; to be the beautiful creations that God already created us to be…

So…be happy…just being YOU!

1 comment:

Hermi said...

"...be the beautiful creations that God already created us to be…

So…be happy…just being YOU!"

Amen! What freedom We have!