In search of happiness………………..
Isn’t it ironical? The good things in life never last forever. Happiness is an illusion that one keeps searching for. We run through our lives in a hurried manner, always on the look out for a special occasion, when everyone in their respective lives are going experience this euphoric happiness.
Life is like an air journey. A song called “Leaving On A Jet Plane Comes” to my mind as I write this article. We keep working throughout our lives in a very hurried manner, looking out the windows of the jet plane called life that we are piloting. And as we sit on the window seat of this flight and travel through our lives, despite possessing so called maturity and expertise that we all possess along with the few strands of gray hair that perhaps stand out as an eloquent testimony of the wisdom that we gain after facing various ups and down of life, yet we sit with the anticipation, exuberance and excitement of a kid who is about to get a gift from Santa, a gift that we have been anxiously waiting for all our lives. A gift called happiness. We look out for this island from air that resembles god’s gift called paradise; a paradise that would probably change everything, one that would end all the sorrows, tensions and miseries.
Perhaps sadly enough, this turns out to be the biggest irony. In the search for this moment of false truth, we keep truthfully lying to ourselves that one day, in the nearly distant future, we would be happy.
In the search for this ultimate paradise, one which we believe would provide us with the ultimate déjà vu, the ultimate frontier of moksha and nirvana, we fail to accept the biggest and basic truth and perhaps commit the biggest blasphemy and blunder of our lives. Man doesn’t realize the very basic truth that the journey that he undertakes in search of happiness is nothing but a delusion; it is a never-ending path leading to a mirage of an oasis in the desert of life. Yet it is human endeavor or call it human nature, that man is willing to sacrifice everything and lead the most chaotic, bizarre and unsatisfactory life full of tension, hatred, anger, misery and contempt, just so that he can get to this gateway paradise, a staircase to heaven.
The irony is that happiness doesn’t lie at any particular moment or place. It is not localized in time or space or for that matter any dimension. The truth is that happiness lies in every action of our life. In every minute and perhaps the most mediocre and unscrupulous, insignificant moment which we spend, moments which we ignore and don’t give importance to, such moments have the potential to provide us with infinite and unparalleled joy and bliss.
The color in nature, the beauty of human life, the scent of a woman, the joy of producing a new life, the exhilaration from the anticipation of falling in love, the feel of touch. In every action of life, happiness is waiting in disguise, only for us to find it and unlock it. It is as if we are in this intricate labyrinth and in a maze of confusion, in a game of hide and seek with contentment and solace. In every action of life, happiness is waiting in disguise, only for us to find it and unlock it. It lies in the smallest of actions of our life, which perform perhaps involuntarily. It is just we never realize it’s presence.
Due to our excessive hunger for a so called paradise of joy, we get blindfolded, dumbfound and gagged to such an extent that we can’t recognize the essence and beauty of life. We are always unsatisfied with what we have and want something more.
The reality is that we have to open our eyes and look around. Infinite moments that we spend with our family, friends, peers, colleagues and our loved ones are the true moments of joy and happiness. Every simple run of the mill day that we spend has infinite potence and innumerable opportunities to be happy. It is like an untapped resource waiting on the brink of being discovered.
We often don’t realize the true worth of the good things, moments, friends in life till the point of time they are no more with us. All the time, when we have these entities around us that provide us with untold joy and unbound ecstasy, we never recognize their true worth. We seem to take things for granted. And sadly enough, when all of a sudden these friends, moments, things, entities disappear and fade in to the dark or vanquish, it is then that we realize their true value and worth for us, how important they are and how difficult life gets without them.
We live our lives in search for a better future, but in the process, we fail to make it a better present. And when we try to analyze as to what went wrong, we realize having wasted an entire lifetime of effort for various materialistic objects of desire, which really don’t matter. When you reach the threshold of sanity, when you are tired of running around and totally exhumed with exhaustion a point of time when you stop and go through a series of self realization and introspection you are then swept with a nauseated feeling, a surge of bile runs through your throat. Your heart bangs on the walls of your chest and looks at you like a child asking a innocent question to the father. You perspire and panic but you have no answers. You have a feeling of being cheated and conned and by whom? Not any one else but yourself. You have robbed yourself of a wonderful hassle free life, just because of your unquenchable thirst for success and so called materialistic happiness.
Any physical object can’t be the source of a beautiful life. Things important in life are not physical in nature; rather they are unseen and invisible in nature. Relationships, emotional and mental security, contentment, trust, truth, satisfaction and numerous other feelings, which can’t be seen but only felt, account for all the difference needed to make picture perfect beautiful life.
Beauty lies in every aspect of life. The cool wind breezing across our face. The flowers gleaming in the sun. The rugged, rough and the turbulent waterfall meeting the placid, serene and tranquil river. The sunset at the end of a tiresome day. The company of good friends and loved ones. A feeling of immense happiness and gratitude for being alive for life bestowed upon us by greater forces. One just needs to sit down and observe the immense beauty that exists in the nature all around us. There is absolute emotional and mental security achieved once one just realizes the need to lower his expectation and greed to some extent and look at the infinite bliss around him.
Take for instance our loved ones. The company of such people makes us feel so complete and content with lives. So many individuals, right from family members, close friends, and those special unexplainable relationships, contribute to our satisfaction. They make us realize how beautiful life is and how happy our lives are. Often we never realize how dependent we are on them. Call it the law of nature, but nothing is permanent in life, nothing lasts forever and so perhaps when a point of time comes when they are not with u, we find it difficult to explain our lives, ourselves and the purpose of life. Be it any reason, if the person we love is snatched away, in whatever sense we see, whether they leave us because of reasons of our actions or perhaps their own decision or for that matter for the law of nature, in either of the cases, a sense of incompleteness dawns upon us. We realize how difficult it is live on with life despite the absence of people whom we are so used to, something like trying to breathe with no oxygen around, you are sinking into the never ending sea of depression. The true worth of any thing is often not realized till the point of time when you don’t have it any more. Often someone comes into our life like a whiff of scented breeze and we get so addicted to the presence in such a manner that when in a spasm of inexplicable cruel stroke of destiny the breeze is snatched away, we find our self gasping, suffocating and collapsing. It is then we realize the dependency and our helplessness.
The truth lies in self-realization and introspection. One has to continuously evaluate himself and his ambitions, have those one on one monologues with yourself as you walk alone down the road, with no one around and it is just you and yourself. While dreaming big and aspiring is a positive approach towards life, which leads us to the point of rendezvous with success, does it mean that we need to carry on forward with life in a monotonous, mechanical and sadistic way? The answer is definitely a big NO. We should know our own potential and find our happiness by keeping expectations confined to a realistic level. One must not be blinded by sheer thirst an hunger for success and a better future to such an extent that we forget to feel good about life. We have to learn to be content with what we have.
In the end, I believe that a balance has to be struck between materialistic goals and spiritual bliss. One should develop an attitude of gratitude for things they have. We have to be satisfied and content. We often mistaken ourselves thinking that materialistic goals and objects are the ultimate frontiers for achieving happiness in human life.
We have to live somewhere between the two spheres of materialism and spiritualism. A life neither too materialistic i.e. not in excessive hunger and thirst for a better future at the cost of a chaotic, uncontrolled present and a life not too spiritualistic that makes us pessimistic to the extent that we don’t aspire to succeed in life.
