Is Happiness your Journey or Destination?

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Courtesy - NPR

This week I’m singing the Serenade of  Happiness and new-found joy. Of meeting old friends, of making new friends, of bonding, of friendships, of love.  

Yes, that’s right! Good things happen when you are ready to accept that it’s OK to be happy in life. I just read a teaching by Sri Sri Ravishankar today. The gist of which is that we always seem to realize reality only when we are sad or drowned in any negative emotions. But it’s just an illusion because happiness is what it is to feel real. Everything else is a fake. Wanting to be happy is our natural instinct. Everything we do is for being happy.

[quote]But the problem is that instead of making happiness a journey, we make it our destination[/quote]. That’s where all of us go wrong. Happiness is in the moment. Not in the past, nor in the future, but in the present. If we concentrate on making our present happy, our past would have been happy and so would be our future, yes?

I realized our minds are somehow tuned these days to a fear of being happy. When we are happy for a sufficient period and nothing goes wrong, a fear rises about how everything can be so smooth. We begin worrying for the bad that is around the corner, and in the process of worrying, we really end up facing the worst which is nothing but the result of our own insecurity.

30 nostalgic photos of manipal 1997 to 2001
Courtesy – NPR

We kill the happiness that we achieved. We become sad and then start looking for happiness again. Running around in circles all the time. It’s only when we accept the fact that happiness is a journey that we learn to really live in the moment and avoid worries. Just look at us! Rumors of the world ending in another 10 days is out in the air and here we are, still planning for the far future. How can we be so sure of an unseen future when we can’t be sure about the present that we can see, we can feel, we can live!

Our minds seem to have a mind of their own!!!  So complicated, so twisted! But when things happen, when you see signs of clarity, it gets a little simplified, a little untwisted. Thoughts seem to fall in the right place and we get a fresh insight into a stale life. In one of the older posts in the SOMC, I mentioned shifting to a new place and had wondered what this change has in store for me! Turns out everything surely happens for a reason. I’ve made such good friends already and it couldn’t get any better.I feel God must have thought, “OK, these people have gone through the same things in life. Let me put them together, so they realize they are not alone in this!”

Good things happen to good people they say. But I think good things happen to everyone who’s ready to receive it and own it. I have welcomed yet another chapter of my life with wide open arms. I have prepared myself to embrace every boon and bane it might come with and deal with it as it comes. I have tuned the channel of my life to the serenade of blissful happiness and unlimited joy. Have you?

 

2 Comments

  1. According to the experts that were interviewed in a documentary I watched sometime last month, 50% of happiness is your genetic disposition, but the other 40% is based on your intention or choice. When you have gratitude for the little things in life, the big things just seem better.

    Something interesting that I learned was that our financial circumstances and position in society only account for about 10% of our happiness. 10%? Yes, and yet we are conditioned to think that having more money, fancier houses and expensive cars are the primary solutions to increase our happiness.

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