I don't know where it's gone, purest smiles at little things.Where has the light in glistening eyes,lips wet with tears of joy without explanation,and the terrible attempt to translate the most profound of emotions into words and having them fall short and fall out and into the air, replaced only with laughter at the unbelievable, gone? Where has the unapologetic joy gone? I don't know. I know it exists, for I have felt it, and I feel it, and I too have tried to explain it but cannot. So where has it gone? In the others, I do not know. In myself, well, it is right where it always has been.

I have noticed something that I wonder if it would have been better for my consciousness if I hadn't noticed.

I was sitting down at my computer, watching a video of a man playing the most happy and beautiful song on the piano in a public airport. I was captivated. No one surrounding the man in the video seemed to care.

I was baffled by this. How, I thought, could anyone not be amazed by this as it was happening? Why the serious expressions? Why the still bodies? Why was no one smiling?

It might be enough to say that the travelers and the waiters for the travelers were tired, but not to even smile? I cannot believe that the listeners were simply tired.

I see it everywhere and on everyone's face, the total apathy of the race of people of my country. There is not joy, and if there is, it is shamed. All joy, it seems, must come with a grain of salt, salt in the shape of pride and must cover up the full depth of any joy, or else should be smothered in the salt completely.

It isn't like this everywhere, I know. I have friends from many countries flung far and all around the Earth, and I find a total difference through them in the people of other countries experiencing their happiness and how the people in mine do.

So often, too often, I see my own generation, generations before me, holding back their feelings, or else not allowing themselves to have any, to keep up a reputation of...I don't even know what, really. What is it for, hiding your joy? For what? For who?

Why should you care if someone stares while you dance? Why should you stop singing if someone gives you a look? Keep dancing, stare the stranger down while you do it or else invite them to join. Keep singing, it is your soul and your voice, anyway! Who says you should silence it because someone else doesn't know how to brave enough to use their own? Who knows, your voice might just pique theirs out of their caves and out into the space that belong to everyone.

Trying to put the meaning back into things is damned near impossible when everyone around you are spending their entire lives trying to get rid of it. You must remember not to let yourself become dead because everyone else surrounding you strips the life from their lives and tries to convince you that the gray concrete of the world they live in is also yours. It isn't.

Your world can be blooming, blossoming, alive! I think it's brilliant when people just decide that they want something. When you find you love something, want something, especially when that thing seems so simple and so small but gives you so much happiness like opening the blinds on a sunny day and taking in the rays or letting the window open a crack to hear the rain, you should always follow that want, that pull, to your happiness.

It is one thing to live your life for others, for their opinions, and so many in America seem to be living for others, crushing or rejecting their emotions for their nonexistent reputation in the eyes of strangers. But, it is another, entirely different thing to really live for yourself. And, to live for yourself, to live for your happiness, to find it so that you can give some of it to others and spread the simplicity of joy that everyone searches for, you must let go of what others think.

Once you do this, you can find the things that make you happy. If you find what makes you happy, you can give some of that happiness to others, and hopefully they will spread it to others. You mustn't let others' thoughts control yours or your actions, and must instead, in your state of self-discovered and achieved happiness, look at the thoughts of strangers and translate them into what they are: thoughts of gray and nothing to patch up and fill in painful scars put in place by others who were hurt. From here, you can give them a piece of your own careless joy, and give them a change to refill those scars with something healing and light and good, good in the truest sense of the word.

Everyone in the world, in any time of strife or turmoil, of which we all stand again, recognizes the need for peace, for happiness, and for growth. But, in order to do this, you must find your own peace, just like no one can change your mind, you are the only one capable of making your own happiness.

And I believe this is something that we can all do, and it certainly would be an easier fix for our problems, wouldn't it? If we just decided to be happy with what we have, with little moments of life that come and go, with the people that surround us, especially the strangers, for they provide us with many thoughts and insights, sometimes just by looking at them. We can make our own happiness, teach other how to find their own and give what we can to them, working together in a state of peace and appreciation to fix the problems that have and continue to afflict so many.

All of this is to say that we needn't be like those expressionless people standing in the airport and that, instead, we can all in a single brave move, decide to be like the man on the piano: happy, free, and totally himself without the care of opinion.