I've been thinking about happiness quite a bit lately. I know what makes me happy. And I was talking with a friend the other day who was struggling with defining what makes him happy. And you know what? I am not happy for a reason, because I think I do not need a reason be be happy. I can be happy because it rained, or because I thought of something from my past. There are things in life that can make me happy and I don't know it's going to. This is true for all people.I have often heard people saying something like "O Gawd, I hate this, I do not like that and I can never try experincing doing something like that ".....But you know what ?When we come across a situation wherein u end up doing it ,it makes you happy. i never liked pasta with Arabitta sauce, I tohught I would puke, but when I tasted it, I loved it !!!! And now I feel happy when I eat it and am eating it for the past 5 years now and can go on relishing it for another 15 yrs.
People (except for me ) confuse their happiness with their goals or what they want from their lives, partners, work, bosses and everyone around.Things that make people happy don't have to be life long goals or dreams or needs or wants.We can even be happy with the pebbles, early morning sunrise by the seashore,a smile on your kids face , a hot choco fudge, a nice rejuvienating spa........these things make me happy .
Happiness for me is the state of mind. A lot of us often percieve it to be the outcome of what we achieve and acquire,as I mentioned earlier. for example, you wanted a car for yourself and you got it .For the one complete month you were the happiest person, then what happened? The same sadness?
But for me Once you master the art of noticing, appreciating and consciously enjoying what you already have, then you will always be happy. I know most of you would not agree with me .
I am a firm believer of appreciating what we have and then then all our troubles become insignificant. Think of someone who is blind, do you ever appreciate your eyesight ? No, most of us do not . This is what happens when we start taking happenings in our life for granted and end up in cribbing and not enjoying what we have .
Happiness in true sense starts with the daily pleasures that we get out of our lives. We must start pinpointing things we are grateful for and even keep a count for them like your hands, your kids, your loving family, your work, people you are associated with.
My small things in life make me happy :freedom, love of life, being able to dream and to desire, to travel and to change, to evolve, to go to new places, to live a creative yet fulfilling life, to change the world or at least my little corner in it wherever that may be, to be a mother and a daughter and a sister and soon to be an aunt. Boulders.... even the boulders of happiness make me happy.
5 comments:
Well,to some extent, i do agree to your statements. If you ask me, “Happiness is temporary, it comes and disappear again, so hold on to the good memories and fun times, treasure your happiness as long as you can”. However, if I were to answer that question philosophically I would say that happiness is an emotion characterized by 'good' feelings and a Hedonic state that is enduring. The pursuit of hapiness is different between people but what characterizes it remains the same.
Well said Avinash ,however, thats what I am trying to express here that happiness is not temporary. It becomes temporary when we do not have the importance of certain things that can make us happy forever. For example, our partners, the treasure of a life that we have, the support of our loved ones, the knowledge that we possess. We seek happiness in moments which are short lived, to be more precise we have become materialistic.Like I said before, its a state of mind.
By Temporary, i mean't comes for sometime and fades off again. Comes again and makes us happy for sometime and goes off again.
Let me explain my philosophy of happiness:
True happiness is such a rare commodity that the whole of the world is continuously seeking it and failing to find it. All the people, who we consider to be the best in their fields, are seeking it too and failing to acquire it. The most brilliant of the scientists, the most gifted of artists, the most talented of poets and authors, the wealthiest businessmen, the most powerful rulers, the greatest achievers in any field - all of them have been striving for it all their lives and failed to have it. Why is happiness such an elusive thing? Is it that it cannot simply be achieved? Or is it that it is not where all of us have been looking for it?
If you pause to give it a thought it is very easy to see that somehow we have all been missing the point. It is either that we have all been looking for happiness at the wrong places or that it is simply not possible to achieve happiness. The answer is not very easy. But it is obvious that if the whole of the humanity has been trying to find something throughout the history and failing to acquire it then something must be very wrong about the concept we have of happiness.
We must realize that for most of the problems, the solutions are often simple and obvious enough if one understands the problem clearly. Even more surprising is the fact that the solutions mostly lie in the problem itself. It is true in the case of happiness too.
Let us consider the above definition carefully. The main keyword in the definition is "want". The whole trouble starts when we want something. Every moment of our lives we keep on wanting something or the other. If we could make a list of all the things we want in our lives since childhood to death, including trivial as well as very important, all the paper in the world perhaps would not be enough for this purpose. Only a small percentage of all our wishes is fulfilled in spite of all our endeavours. The percentage of wishes, which remain unfulfilled, keeps on growing with time. As a result, as we grow older, we become more and more unhappy. We grow tired of life. The blessings, which our lives and the whole existence keep showering upon us, gradually lose their charm. The frustration, of failing to fulfill most of our wishes, sets in. We start feeling weighed down. The feeling that the whole life is somehow conspiring to keep us unhappy grows. Life becomes full of miseries. We keep stumbling from one failure to another.
The solution, then is very obvious. We must explore the possibility of a life of no desires or minimum desires. Desire is a seed which grows fruits of unhappiness. Actually the trouble is that we demand too much. We keep on demanding incessantly. It seems that we do nothing else but keep producing desires and then keep struggling to fulfill them. The only solution to this problem is to break out of this cycle of desires and struggles. If one does not desire anything, he has no chance of getting unhappy due to failure in fulfilling his desire.
One may argue that a life of no desires will be bereft of pleasures. That it will become colourless and dull. But this premise is not true.
Actually, happiness and unhappiness are two sides of the same coin. They are part of the same package. If one asks for one he leaves himself susceptible to the other. The desire for happiness is like asking only for the light and not for darkness. But there is not much difference between light and darkness. It is matter of degree only. We choose and therefore get disappointed. What we should do is only look for the pleasures all around us. Whatever comes our way we should try to extract all the pleasure possible from it.
If we delve still deeper, we will realize that it is not really happiness which we should seek. We should try to avoid unhappiness. When we achieve something, the payoff is not as great as the pain we suffer if we fail to achieve it. It is this pain of failure, pain of frustrated desires which is of greater significance to us. It is actually like good health. One can only define health as an absence of diseases. In order to have good health we strive to avoid diseases. You cannot purchase or achieve good health directly. You have to take steps which keep your body free of diseases. Then only the organs of body keep functioning properly and you experience good health. Similarly, when one destroys the root cause of unhappiness the problems are over. And the root cause of all our unhappiness is DESIRE.
If one can stop desiring, if one can take life as it comes, Then only one can be free of unhappiness.
HEy i like your philosphical thoughts..let me add a dash of spice to this. We have 2 kinds of ppl who react to happiness- One, those who sulk in absence of it and continue to sulk others into their life..something which can be explained with
"Dil Khush hua Masjid-e-viran dekh-kar" - Harish
"Ki meri tarah khuda ka bhi khana Kharab hai"
And others who are immune to their personal achivement on the happpiness front, still strive to make others happy, best explained with these time-tested lines and philosphy -
" Ghar-se Masjid hai bahut door"
"Chalo kisi rote-hue saksh ho hasaya jai".
Which kinds are you???? Ponder!! Ponder!!
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