The happiest place on earth
Welcome to the happiest place on earth! A place where you can find children excitedly running around wearing Mickey Mouse headbands, parents behaving like kids and screaming loudly in roller coasters, and grandparents giddily having their photos taken beside Cinderella. It is a place to be when you want to forget your problems, spend money on highly inflated priced souvenirs, watch dreamlike fireworks display, and just be… happy. Welcome to Disneyland!
My life was a never ending search for the happiest place. When I was a kid, I thought that it was the toy store. My parents were poor but they certainly were hard working. They had four kids in a span of just seven years. So imagine how hard it was for my mother to buy anything for us. We played with hand me down toys from relatives.
When I was six, I chanced upon a toy doctor's kit in one store. It was made of cheap plastic material but to my young eyes, it looked like gold. I begged my mom to buy it. She did not. She still had to buy food. So I sulked and cried for days. And then one day, I got it. I don’t know what my mother had to sacrifice or where she got the money but she bought that toy for me. I played with it then the cheap plastic material of the stethoscope broke and I forgot about it. My happiness lasted for one week.
At 17, I started dreaming about true love so I thought that my happiness can be found in the arms of my dream man. That man would be smart, someone who could talk about politics and gracefully shift topic to movies and still sound smart. He would be charming, sweet, and could speak in English without mixing his ps and fs and his subject verb agreement. And lastly, he would look like Dingdong Dantes. But I am not Marian Rivera so needless to say, I never found that man.
But i wanted to be happy so I settled. Boyfriend after boyfriend after boyfriend resulted in heartache after heartache after heartache because I expected a lot from them. I thought they could and should make me happy all the time. But I was wrong.
Swearing off men for years, to the dismay of a lot of men I know, I poured all my energy at work. I tried very hard to become the best employee the company had ever seen because I thought if I would get recognition I would be happy. I spent more time at work than at home. I talked to the computer more than I talked to real people. I became so passionate about doing my best in my job that if I saw my boss relaxing, I got irritated. But after 10 years of hard work and not getting the recognition I wanted, I left my job and was actually surprised that I became happier and prettier to boot with smaller eye bags.
I searched and searched and searched and in the middle of my exhausting quest of finding that happiness, it just dawned on me where it can be found. Happiness definitely cannot be found in
toys, gadgets or any material thing. You may think you'd really be happy if you'd have an iPhone X but in two years there will be an iPhone XX. Will you stop being happy?
Happiness certainly does not depend on your significant other. So you are happy because you found someone sweet caring and understanding but what if, years from now, that person stops being so? Will you stop being happy?
And happiness simply and most obviously does not depend on your job. No employee is indispensable. Even Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. If you lose your job, will you stop being happy?
There was a time – no, make that many times – when my mother and I did not see each other eye to eye. Before it felt like the end of the world so my diary would be filled with things like “I wish I was never born or “Why doesn't she love me”? I always expected my mother to make me happy. To give me what I want. How wrong I was. My happiness depends on me. Now I just go to my happy place and remember that doctor’s kit she bought and how much she sacrificed for me and I become instantly happy.
My pursuit for happiness is over. I realized that I do not need to travel to the US, China, Japan, France or Hong Kong to see Disneyland.
Friends, we do not need to seek for happiness. It’s inside all of us. It’s that place in our own hearts that holds wonderful memories. It’s that place that we can revisit when we are down. It’s that place that can lift us up and give us courage to move on.
Life will always put us in challenging situations and I learned that if only we choose to see the good side more than the bad, to see the best in everyone we meet, we will turn experiences into beautiful memories. And this is how we can find the happiest place on earth.