The Grass Isn't Greener (or, Finding Happiness) by Allista

The Grass Isn't Greener (or, Finding Happiness) by Allista - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

My freshman year passed in a picturesque haze of sleepless nights and desperate wanderlust. A stable family life and a solitary home that I had been in for as long as I could remember felt like a cheese grater against exposed nerves. There had to be more to the world. There had to be something magical out there, adventures and new friends, places filled with rain and grass (rarities in the Nevada desert). I would be happy if I wasn't here. Anywhere else would do, and that is a dangerous thing to believe. Enter sophomore year, and Mr. Mason, the chemistry and physics teacher.

Mr. Mason was a transplant from Pennsylvania, and he had made Nevada his home, spent a couple years in South Carolina, and moved back here. The first thing I noticed when I walked into his room on the first day of school was a homemade poster on printer paper featuring an image of a little flowering cactus poking its head out of rocky ground. Above the picture was text that read simply, “grow where you’re planted.” From the beginning, the poster niggled at my mind, like there was some deeper meaning that could be enlightenment itself if I could just understand. Despite that feeling, I rejected it out of hand -- I knew that I needed to be somewhere else as soon as I could, and the remaining three years of high school ought to be about planning road trips and clinging with broken nails to haphazard dreams of travel and impulsive moves. I ignored the poster as something trite and overly simple, merely the hopeful imaginings of someone more content than I. It was foolish and filled with a teenager’s reckless overconfidence, but Mr. Mason believed his place in the world was to guide us not only in matters of science, but matters of life as well, and the day we went on Christmas break he used the class time to tell us stories -- especially about why he moved back here.

His story began like mine was going. Nevada was not the home he had dreamed of finding. Unlike me, he knew what it was like to live in a place with a traditional four seasons, snow, grass, chilly autumn days where sidewalks wear a regal mantle of fallen leaves. Missing that, he moved to South Carolina after four years in Nevada, expecting a new place to be what would make him happy. He was wrong. South Carolina was everything he had wanted in terms of a job and region, but it brought health problems to his wife and never really seemed to be the perfect location he so desperately wanted. Even there his students moaned that there was nothing to do on weekends or breaks, despite an amusement park in town and a city less than half an hour away -- something he recognized from teaching students in Nevada. As the period drew to a close, he leaned back on the table he used as a desk and told us, “The grass isn’t greener anywhere else, and everyone else feels the way you do too.”

It was that piece I needed. I still felt like running away from stability and finding somewhere new, but now there was a bit of caution tempering it. Why run when nothing will change? His message went deeper than telling us that “the grass isn’t greener;” he was teaching us that happiness comes from ourselves, not from location. A fairy tale quest for life’s meaning will not accomplish anything if the seeker begins expecting a new place or new people to be the answer to everything. That quest needs to be made internally, because happiness is a state of mind and not a place or an action.

This lesson could have come to me in time, developed alongside maturity, but Mr. Mason saved me so much pain and frustration by sharing his experiences and telling his class that the grass is never greener somewhere else. I did not get better all at once, but over the next years I came to appreciate my home and now, on the cusp of moving, I realize that I really do love this sleepy little town. The best part is that loving this place is what will let me love my college town too. Mr. Mason’s story of seeking the same thing I had been looking for (in less obvious terms) is easily the most important lesson any teacher has taught me, and I am forever thankful for it.