The ocean sings, the winds whisper, and the trees dance. You don’t notice. You don’t see that this world was created just for you. Every second of every day was crafted meticulously for you to be observably happy. The ocean sparkles for you, the winds whisper for you, and the trees dance for you. Yet you ignore them. You say they aren’t alive.
You wake up empty. You wanted to wrap your head around how the materials are on your side. You didn’t. Here, now you curse the atoms and molecules because once you discovered despair, you dried the sea, punched the winds, and chopped the trees. Freed them of life.
Your anger is but a selfish escape from the happiness you once yearned to ride on to the brink of the world. You were once so dreamily inflated. You were filled with a lightning of life that wanted to enter your bloodstream and make a home out of you. How your parents would have loved to see you there forever, consumed in a youthful, explorative wonder that knew no sadness.
How I wish I could give your parents what they want.
Now, your downturned eyes utter things your lips never should. Turn off the sounds for one moment and listen to a lonely silence; feel the emptiness it introduces.
It is emptier than you and I.
In that silence is everything. What do you choose to listen to?
On one shoulder, the silence irks you to lurk further into your own infinitely dark depths of despair. It takes your sight and blurs lines, leaves your eyes exhausted and your heart broken. On a whim, by natural happenstance, it forces you down so aggressively that your shoulder buckles. Once there, you have no option but to lean on this side’s absence of light. After all, if you dwell anywhere for too long or one too many times, it will fool you into thinking it’s a home. Let me tell you that you are misguided if you feel secure in that. That is not your happiness.
On the other shoulder, the silence asks you to love. It asks you to search for light in the things you deem unsightly. It asks you to see everything for what it is. Art. It asks you to ideate and merrily create. It asks you to understand that it is okay to accept each other despite imperfections. It asks you to lift up a life, to care for it tenderly. And even when you don’t want to touch it, it asks you to give it wings. It wants you to be the light that shimmers as it glides atop the wavy ocean, gliding nearer and nearer to the shore. To be the light touches the jellyfish. It wants you to be the rays that find their way through vacant spaces between grains of sand. It wants you to stand tall like the trees, to open your arms wide, and to plant roots where the world needs you the most.
It asks you to give life to what you think is lifeless. That can be your happiness.
Peter Wallace 
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