Peace

People search all of their lives for contentment. A source of joy. A source of relief. A feeling of freedom. They think that a certain path or a certain destination will make them happy. So they search for it in other people, in things, pieces of paper, careers, a lover, a marriage, a tangible something. When they are done with all those experiments, some of them realize that happiness is something that cannot be defined, bottled, inked, or manifested through something external to one's own mind and heart.

I've learned that the things we get the most excited about are those things that end up disappointing us the most, somehow. As one of the replicas of myself says The air outside the coffee shop felt too much like what she’d left. Always deceiving you with its lazy glamour and promises of paradise. She’d fallen into that trap once and found herself hating what she’d once loved. That's the thing about anything external. It can't live up to promises that the soul wishes to keep.

So the only thing we can do as humans is realize that happiness is not a temporal feeling or something that we can find, or seek, or capture. It is something that is already free, something that already exists and yet cannot be touched, or seen, or realized unless we stop seeing what we see. It is internal. It is peace. It is contentment. It is calm.

It is the place that we never leave, the person that we know and smile back at, the mountain that we only think we have to climb. It is that illusion that we chase. That illusion that changes each time we change. Peace and contentment are not horizons that we imagine we will someday become a part of. They are things that Nature does automatically. Simple breaths. Simple acceptance. Simple Being. Not as what it thinks it should be, but as what it already is.

That elusive thing we humans call "happiness" is an illusion because it can only exist within each of us. It can only exist in how we see.