“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them”
– Steve Maraboli
If you tell somebody with whom you are driving that we just passed a medical shop where you get an herbal tonic which makes you energised and confident in four weeks, chances are he might turn back and ask you which is the shop. Similarly, if you point out during your travel that there is a new best seller doing the rounds about how to ‘live well’, you can be sure that at the first opportunity your companion would be on the look out for the book.
This is our anxiety. All of us want to live well and happy. Most of us are searching for it as though it was our costly tie clip. Happiness is ‘costly’ but it is not a commodity that you search for. It is there for you and with you for the asking.
Your mind is like a garden and it is left to you to grow what you want. As Ritu Ghatourey says you thoughts are like seeds, either you can grow flowers or weeds. The choice is wholly yours. I will narrate some stories that makes this simple concept clearer.
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- This is a story about a person with a big smile on his face entering his orthopedist’s clinic on his newly acquired legs – the crutches. Too pleased with his patient’s progress, the doctor, in booming voice called out “You look happy today”! The family accompanying the man protested and claimed that far from happiness, they were devastated ever since the accident which they could ill afford. The same people, a few days ago were begging everyone in the hospital to save the boy at any cost. All that mattered to them was his life. The victim of the motor cycle accident was the sole bread winner for the family. According to reports, it appears that he was test driving the new “bike” on a newly laid road which was yet to be opened for traffic. He did not see the road diversion board. He was in the hospital when he regained consciousness. He could still go back and resume work and his other parts of the body were repairable in due course.
(2).This story is about a man who applied for employment in a New York’s public-television company. Just when the interview was coming to a close, the president of the company asks him as to how he spent his spare time. The man is said to have replied very modestly that he “competed” in tennis tournaments and did “a little bit of hiking”. In support of his claim of doing “a little bit of hiking”, the man, it seems, produced a photograph of himself scaling at “14,000-foot level of snowy Mount Whitney” in California.
Within hours, it appears that the company got in touch with him and offered the post of the head of the television station. The president of the company was amazed by the man’s zest and “energies”. If one had so much energy still left in him in his spare time then his energies must be bountiful thought the president. The man was 61-years-old.
(3) Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy (JRD) Tata, head of India’s huge Tata industrial empire, renowned for his extra cautiousness, one who always listened to other people’s counsel undertook, at the age of 78, against all advise to make a solo flight in a vintage aircraft from Karachi to Bombay, (a 600-mile flight) to re-enact “his pioneering effort 50 years ago, when he began Air India’s first commercial airmail service.” He told waiting admirers and fans that the underlying object of his feat was:
“To rekindle enthusiasm among the younger generation”
(4). Vijaypat Singhania, a textile tycoon of India soared past 21,000 metres (69,000 feet) beating, at the age of 67, a previous world record of 19,811 metres (64,997 feet) in a hot air balloon as high as a 22-storey building claiming that he wanted to do “something important in life. In a lighter vein, he is reported to have said:
“Since I had nothing to do, I decided to embark upon this mission”
History is replete with countless such stories. In the examples narrated above, we find an anecdote which describes ambivalence in our wants and in our prayers (as in the first case where the family is not being grateful enough for the fact that the situation was not the worse of what they had dreaded); of human relationships (as in the happiness of the doctor about the man’s progress shared equally by the patient in spite of his crutches) and tales that depict mankind’s’ sheer determination, self help and self-effacement, as found in the last example. If we so desire we may find answers to many of our tribulations which we wrongly label as vexed. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant says:
“It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy”
Life is riddled with complexities but we have no control over happenings in life. The problem really is how we react to them. Our happiness lies in the narrow compass of their resolution and yet why do we not care to resolve them? Is it because we do not realize that life’s vicissitudes include sadness and so, a preoccupation only with happiness disregarding sadness as part of life’s cycle would be to “foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience”.[i]
We need not go in search of bliss. Instead, we have to learn appreciation, adventure, ambition, art, and attitude. Let us build our self-esteem and self- confidence; develop character, courage, enthusiasm, passion, and creativity. Let us have hope, health, inspiration, integrity, kindness and knowledge. Such are the kinds of countless stories we hear, speak or write about.
David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian, so rightly observed about human conduct thus:
“The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.”
This is ZEST- a zest for life.
The bane of the present society is this lack of zest.
The youth is getting more tired and drained out now at seventeen than the older generation who were not tired even at seventy. Happiness therefore, is a conscious choice and not an automatic response and hence is available for all those who want to make themselves happy
[i]<http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t5wqrs9hpxt70zjz3bv348pqg1hcxz0r>
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Dynamics of Personality 