HAPPINESS (cut short)

How many times have you asked somebody “what do you want in life?” and the answer has been “happiness”? If you have not, then do go around doing a quick dip-stick and you will realize that alas, this is the standard answer that perhaps was printed on our brain when we were all manufactured in that unique super-efficient creature factory, hidden behind inaccessible cloudy barricades.

But if you ask these same people what is happiness, you would encounter a strange lull. They either do not know the answer, or are confused, or volunteer with something that they think is right, only to realize a little later, and on several occasions at that, that something else normally turns out to make them ‘happy’. Or does it?

I read somewhere that there are only two approaches to life – the victim approach and the victimizer approach. Gory as it sounds, it is really simple and sweet. It means that either we accept that it is we who create and influence everything that happens in our life, which means we are the victimizer, OR we deem that we are the victim and things ‘happen’ to us, situations and experiences occur without our own control. The choice is totally ours. Basically, when you take responsibility for all of reality, then you give yourself the power to change anything within reality; having a handle on your own life – governing what occurs and influences you – or rather making sure it is you, and only you that influences you.

So many times if we dissect any ‘difficult’ situation we are in, we end up realizing that it is the conditions we have created in our mind that are making the situation difficult! You know, conditions about how we should be behaving, what we should be getting out of it, expectations of others from us, expectations of ourselves from us, expectations of ourselves from others; and the list is endless.

So what is my take on happiness? Well I feel we can start by doing everything we love and that makes us happy. But first, find out what makes you happy. Ask yourself this question even when it seems like the most the most tedious questions to answer. Ask yourself over and over again, in times disconnected to each other and see if the answer is consistent. Now break this answer down to the minutest of the detail – in a moment to moment manner. What about this happiness can you do on a moment to moment manner that makes you happy?

But do not mistake solutions to momentary anxieties and fears as true sources of happiness. And do not harm anybody – what goes around, truly comes around and this world works on the system of harmony – taking away somebody else’s happiness to make your own will yield, at best, temporary results. Similarly looking at somebody else’s happiness and hoping to steal it / replicate it because you have not looked inside yourself may, at best, yield superficial results because you are, of course, unique.