A Key To Happiness
I2Q February 2018 editorial
www.ink2quill.com

Happiness isn´t a formula like a single fruit that we can pluck from the tree of life. Some people stumble into it others work and plan toward it. Everybody gives advice on how to obtain it. Funny enough though some of those advice givers don´t even have it themselves. To my knowledge nobody has it their whole life, in perpetuity, unless you´re the Buddha. I think one of the things that can lead you to happiness is living in the right place. Let me explain.

Some people travel and some never leave their hometowns. Travelling is important for growth and stimulation and it´s also a lot of fun but I think an important component to happiness is to live where you want. More precisely, to love where you live. All of us have places we´d like to visit and places we´d like to live but to live in the place we love is an important part of happiness. This sounds obvious but it isn´t. Some choose a place to live based on a job or having family in the area. You have to choose a place where you get up on your day off and love to go out and interact with it. That´s it. You want to live in a city that you love to interact with. Like a close friend. That doesn´t necessarily involve spending money either. Those are places you should call home. Some consider cities like New York or Paris nowadays are home. I feel comfortable in those cities but those are not the cities I choose to live in and call home. Think of how well that idea works in storytelling.

Many characters in litterature don´t live where they want to and yearn for home. Famous examples are Odysseus from Homer´s Odyssey. Odysseus yearns to go home to Ithaca. The only place where he´ll be happy. He leaves Calypso´s comfortable captivity and embarks on a treacherous journey home.

There´s also the characters of Bilbo Baggins from ”The Hobbit” who longs to return to the shire or Paul Sheldon (played by James Caan) from the horror film ”Misery” who wants to leave the clutches of a crazed fan for obvious reasons.

So in storytelling, the character who yearns for home or must get home under desperate situations is a very real scenario that we can all associate with. Deep down inside we all know that home really is where the heart is. We´re all hobbits in that respect.

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