What, Exactly, Makes Someone Happy Forever?

I'm taking reading classes this quarter- save the best for last, right? Pretty much my entire quarter will be spent teaching reading, writing, and spelling to fourth graders. Yesterday was our first day of class, and our professor introduced to us a a project called a literacy bag. We have to pick out a children's book to base around this project, so I made a little trip to one of my favorite places in town- the public library! Can I just say that I love the library? There is something so exciting about walking into a building teeming with books- a great frontier of possibilities and unknowns just waiting to be explored. Anyway, I was perusing through the children's books section, just picking up random books and thumbing through them, for a suitable book for my project. When I found it. Claire and the Unicorn Happy Ever After by BG Hennessy. I picked it up. Sparks flew. It was love at first sight. It was not suitable for my project, but I tucked it into my quickly growing pile of books intending to read it before bed that night. Claire and the Unicorn. Happy Ever After. It just sounded so me. Like I said, sparks flew. I could no more put it back on the shelf than if it had welded itself to my palm. So, last night, I curled up on my bed, turned on my lamp, and opened Claire and the Unicorn Happy Ever After. The illustrations are beautiful: soft and glowing and fantastical. The words are beautiful: simplistic and lyrical and... thought-provoking. As much as I expected to enjoy this fantasy children's book, I never expected it to be thought-provoking. It's about a little girl, Claire, and her stuffed unicorn Capicorn who listen to nightly fairy tale bedtime stories read to her by her dad. Each of the fairy tales end the same way: happy ever after. What exactly, she wonders, makes every character happy forever? In her dreams, Claire and Capicorn visit many characters: a tired princess, a frog prince, a spell-casting fairy godmother, a magical wishing well, even a library fairy. She asks each character what would make them happy forever, and each character gives her a different answer: a bed that's not lumpy, big, juicy flies, pumpkin spells, shiny pennies, a good book and some peace and quiet. Claire and Capicorn come to the conclusion at the end of the book that different things make different people happy. There is no one answer. Which leads me to the question: what does make someone happy forever? What would make me happy forever? Can something make a person happy forever? Is it another person, or a career, or a hobby, or a philanthropy, or an acquisition of something valuable? Is there really such a thing as a happy ending? I am a dreamer. I always have been. I always will be. And in my dreams, in my world, there is a happy ending. There is a happy ever after. Period. I truly believe that. I've wished, and I've planned, and I've hoped, and I've waited for my happy ending to come. I've staked my entire life on that belief. Someone, someone very special to me and whose opinion I deeply respect, has been teaching me that if I spend all my time planning to live my life, planning my happy ever after, then I'll never get around to actually living my life. My happy ever after will always be in my future instead of now. He is helping me to see that my present reality can also be my fairy tale, that I am already beautiful, that I am already the princess, that it is already "happy ever after." I have never thought of it that way before. But now that I have, I rather like it. Living my fairy tale life right now instead of wishing that it will come soon? I can do that. I am a dreamer; take me higher. Open the sky up and start a fire. I believe even if it is just a dream. ~Bethany Dillon