The Elusive Pursuit of Happiness

I don’t think that I am overstating when I say that every human being is on a pursuit of finding happiness in his/her life.  The number of songs, poems, and movies on this topic justifies this statement.  The difference lies in what each person considers happiness and how each go about attaining this goal. 

The pursuit of happiness may be defined as a fundamental right to freely pursue joy and live life in a way that makes you happy, as long as you don’t do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

This means that we need to focus on ourselves, while at the same time don’t allow our pursuit of happiness to hurt another person.  It is important to remember that happiness comes from a state of mind and not from what is happening in the world around us. 

Some things to help us become happy:

  • Be around people who make you laugh.
  • Maintain your values.
  • Say, “Yes, please” when someone offers to help
  • Look for the best in people
  • Do things you love to do.
  • Find purpose in your life.
  • Listen to your heart.
  • Push yourself, not others.
Photo by Laura Stanley on

Every person searches for happiness to sustain a good state of mind. This may direct us to new thoughts, which would lead to new ideas.  These new ideas will guide us to action, which, in turn, leads to success.

Our Declaration of Independence even states,


Thomas Jefferson

To find our happiness, the questions we need to answer for ourselves are:

  1. What is happiness to me?
  2. What people make me happy?
  3. What activity makes me happy?
  4. What location makes me happy?
  5. When am I happiest?

It is by paying attention to the so-called little things that we will eventually find out that they are the big things in life. 

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: