The Declaration of Independence and Me

After all these years of reading the Declaration of Independence in school, one of the lines finally hit me. You know, the one that goes something like:

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

All humans are endowed with those rights. The last one being the pursuit of happiness. Now, luckily, the founders figured out that you can't catch happiness. Good for them. But they also hit on something a lot more important (for me at least): the fact that all humans pursue happiness. If you ask someone what the point of life is, you might get a lot of different answers. But most, if not all, of these answers will point to finding happiness in life.

For the past two years or so, I've been so holier-than-thou, thinking that my purpose in life couldn't possibly be that base. Now don't hate me, please. :)

My point is, I finally get it. Everybody, in some form or another, is just looking to be happy. I know that most of you picked that up intuitively, so all this babbling on my part seems like a giant waste of good interweb space. But something moved me to post this epiphany.

But realizing that we all want happiness, one must also realize we all go about getting it in different ways. And that, basically, is what makes the world go around. Some of us find it in other people, some in accomplishments. A great many find it in television, in drugs, in pills, and in alcohol. Some find it in a party. Others in a good book. But they all find it.

Maybe.

Because some ways of finding happiness are better than others. Drugs, not so good. But then again, I've never used them, so I really should withhold my judgement. However, I can say that a good book, good company, or a good time are awesome methods for inducing happiness.

All that just to say that I've realized I want to be happy. Wow.

But don't worry, I want you to be happy too. For some reason, I do that just out of habit. I want everyone to be happy. And no matter what Dave says, I think it's possible. :)

Editor's Note: And after posting this, I'm forced to think of something I read yesterday. It was from a worksheet in AP English called How to Read a Book. It was remarkably profound, considering the lame title. It said something to the effect of, "It's not how many books you get through, but how many books get through to you." And I was like, wow. How many books have actually gotten through to me? I'm ashamed to say very few.

The point being I have this tendency to come up with / find an idea, and then completely ignore / forget it's real world applications. I need to work on that. Thought I'd share. :)