He walked down the street with his briefcase in hand, ready for yet another day of work. The days had begun to seem as if they were blending together, each feeling longer than the day before. He took a deep breath and walked through the park. He looked over at the pond he passed by every morning and sat down on the bench to wait for the bus to arrive to take him to his office building. When he sat down he noticed a rough patch in the dirt below his feet. He knelt down and carefully began to take what looked like a journal out of the dirt. When he pulled the journal out of the dirt he brushed off the dirt and dust to find the entries of all the people who had found the journal before him. Seeing that he had plenty of time before the bus got there to take him to work he took out his pen nd began to write what was on his mind:

'Do you remember when the teacher would ask the question everyone seemed to ask. 

'What do you want to be'

Everyone would jump up and down at the thought of labeling their future and securing their lives with one simple thought.

'But why can't we just be happy?' I remember asking.

It was the question so few would ask.

Instead of narrowing our future why can't we just pick the more simple answer?

Why can't we just live our lives the way we want?

Why do we have to have this life plan?

Why not just live the days as they come?

All of the questions have just one simple answer: happy.

If we want to be happy in this world we have to know the continuous anthem. 

This is the anthem of what we may not know the answer to but we make it up as much as it is for them as it is for us. 

It gives them hope and for us it supplies relief. 

It gives us the relief of not having to answer the question.

But just think, the lie you told them will turn into a belief.

We may have known that our answer isn't what we wanted to be.

But we couldn't help but start believing it. 

Because through it all we know we just wanted to be happy.

We just wanted them to accept us.

We wanted them to accept what we believed in.

Not only that but we wanted to fit in with the status quo. 

We wanted them to see through all the lies and emotions and troubles to what was truly within.

Funny isn't it?

How this anthem begins with such a simple concept?

We just wanted to be happy. 

But no one seems to hear this continuous, broken, plea. 

It was the plea for the freedom to think what we thought without judgment. 

It was the plea we all seemed to cry though nobody seemed to hear us.

This would continue as a constant. 

At least, until we realized that nobody would hear or acknowledge this plea and we gave up. 

Just like that, we would give up to the status quo of securing our futures instead of just thinking: happy.

We all took this as a long and gradual hit to our heart.

Our mindset of happy seemed to stop when we stopped believing in the small things. 

It would take us apart. 

Because then we didn't know the difference between what they told us and what was real.

Because then make believe was our happy.

It didn't matter if we still believed or not, we'd answer 'no' when they asked and feel awful for lying to them and ourselves. 

We just didn't want them to make fun of us for telling the truth and saying 'yes'. 

We just wanted to be happy. 

This concept we seemed to better understand in our youth.

But this knowledge seemed to go away the older we got. 

When we thought our happy was ours when really it was someone else's. 

That's what we were taught.

We were taught our happy wasn't our unless it was someone else's too.

This we had to believe, if only because everyone else did as well.

It was with this one half belief that we flew.

Because all we wanted, was to be happy.'

He wrote, pouring his heart out onto the paper along with all of his regrets he had ever made. He carefully closed the book and put it back down in the dirt, covering it back up for someone else to find and write their own thoughts in. His day seemed to brighten a bit from then on, the weight that had been on his shoulders relieved a bit, knowing that someone would someday read his troubles.