In the pursuit of happiness....

My three and a half year old niece, who was fretting about going to play school, was asked this question. Do you want to be educated or uneducated? Without a moment’s hesitation she looked us squarely in the eye and said – “I want to be happy!”

I learned that day.

We are all born experts at being happy. And yet there are shelf-full of books in every book store telling us about 10-steps, 7-ways, and 21-great ideas about ‘how to be happy’. It doesn’t add up. If we already knew to be happy, and God programed us so, then what the hell happened since then and now? Pun intended.

Here’s my take on it after observing myself falling into the (un)happiness trap more than once since I was a drooling toddler who always laughed and smiled.

As we enter adulthood, we learn that being happy means we have the responsibility to keep ourselves happy. As a consequence – we are held responsible if that state morphed into unhappiness for some reason. This is too much to ask in a day and age when switching channels can ‘do the needful.’ When we can’t find that right channel to put us in a good mood, at least we can blame the rotten programming of channels we pay good money to watch.

On a more sensible note: Being happy is on our hands. We make ourselves happy. And however unkind people might be to us, they seriously don’t have enough power over us to MAKE us unhappy. Unless, of course, we have granted them the power, in which case, we are puppets in their hands – much like the remote we click to toggle between channels. The feeling of controlling others is a heady one. Being controlled seems to have its own addicts. If those that control us are having a good time, let me upset the cart by saying we also derive some twisted pleasure in being driven by them. An unpleasant medicine to gulp, but bitterly true.

Another interesting fact about being happy that I’ve discovered. Big things don’t make us more happy and small things don’t make us less happy – in proportion. We are not talking physics and matter here. This is about the mysteries of the mind that we don’t yet measure in micro ounces. And thank God for that. I can safely say that looking for more happiness in more money, a bigger home, a pricier car, or a fancier job is just a trap. And here is how it works. If we can’t be happy with what we have we generally end up being unhappy with what we get. I think this is nature’s brilliant way to put the brakes on our wild-goose chase for more happiness.

How tough is it to find happiness, anyway? Very, I think. We aren’t supposed to ‘find’ it, we need to create it. And that’s where I think our confusion becomes messy and painful. It is not a thing that we can find. Happiness is about beliefs and related feelings that we create.

And if we understand that, then we can do two things to create happiness which I find very useful.

For starts, we can stop comparing our life with others to figure out what they have which we don’t. It is a big mistake and causes so much unhappiness. The only way to achieve all the good stuff in our life is to compare ourselves with ourselves. Now that is healthy and effective both.

Secondly, we need to accept that happiness is a paradox. When we find it right next to us, it stays. When we go looking for it, it becomes elusive. Rather sadistic, but that’s the nature of happiness.

I genuinely hope that in our pursuit of happiness, we become happy people. In my personal experience, happy people have a happy life.