How often do I stop and think to myself, “how happy am I? How could I become happier?,” only to realize that this questioning and actively seeking does nothing to further my objective. When pondering real joy, I seem to “yield up moral questions in despair” (Bump 697) and I begin to realize the truth in the statement, “Ask yourself to be happy, and you cease to be so” (Mill 694). However, this frustration is derived not from these unanswerable questions, but from the fact that I am asking them at all, that they are consuming my time.

Like a child, I should be living my life for the simple purpose to “only connect, live in fragments no longer.” The accidental discoveries of new aspects of life and finding connections between nature and oneself is what brought the immense wonder and consequential joy that one finds in children. These children don’t question their emotions, they simply “inhale happiness with the air that [they] breathe” (Mill 694). They feel the unity between themselves and nature as they play. Their wild, uninhibited imagination is free from doubt and superficial stress which we often impose upon ourselves in our mature lives. They feel no pressure from society and exist for the simple pleasures they find in interaction with nature and each other. We must take our childhood memories and experiences and learn to cherish them, for through abandoning our materialistic, objective, “mature” culture we too may learn to find “Heaven in a Wild Flower” and to “Hold Infinity in the palm of you hand” (Blake 704).