The pursuit of happiness

Once I met a tiger.
He asked me: “What are you looking for?”
I answered: “I am in the pursuit of happiness.”
He said: “But how can you look for happiness? It cannot be seen.
What do you do?”
I said: “Well, for many decades I searched outside. I traveled far and wide. I looked at many different people in many different countries, from all walks of life. But what I saw was never sheer happiness. There was always a sort of discontent and wanting things to be different.”
He answered: “This is true. You should know that happiness cannot be found outside of you. You must look inside.”
I said: “True. So after many decades of eating out, of partying, of learning new things, of teaching, of wandering the world, the only thing that is left, is to just be.”
He said: “And what did you find in the end?”
I answered: “That each individual has a light and a dark side and that only when the person is ready to encounter their darkness, can there be peace.”

The tiger looked at me for a while and when he did not reply I added: “And also in me there exists this anger, depression, even violence. If I see it in another person, it is also in me. There must be a resonant frequency. So whatever we encounter, that is our mirror to be looked at. Sometimes it may be a faint memory of how we once were, sometimes it may be that we understand a new reality. But it is always a mirror. So we cannot say that we are only happiness, peace and love. Because we are not.”
“This is certainly wise”, the tiger answered, “and therefore we must part ways before I encounter my own darkness and eat you.”

When he left, I followed his direction nostalgically and finally surrendered to the darkness in me.
If the tiger only knew that I was him…


Vanessa