Happiness - The Most Elusive Emotion

Over the last couple of months, I have been mostly blogging reviews of movies and books, and so I wanted to blog on a topic, which is more deep and different. However, the problem with this approach is it takes a lot of time to research and form an opinion to write about something. I almost felt like being in a writer’s block, even though I was writing regularly. The thought to what I would blog in the next weekend kind of persisted throughout the week. Though I have some thoughts, philosophies or musings, I never post at this blog, since I think this blog is in a different genre. And then, it struck to me, since the blog is rushinspeaks, why can’t I blog what I perceive and hence this blog-post.

The idea of this post came from the very thought, why do I want to blog every weekend, what does writing give to me (except the funny feeling to see the small virtual amount of money in Adsense, which will never cross the needed $100 to give me any real money), and the answer was “Happiness”, hence the topic.

Disclaimer: This is a type of topic I don’t generally blog about and hence the flow may not set correctly, please bear with the same.

Happiness

For those who don’t know, the above clip is taken from the Famous Movie “The Pursuit of HappYness”, which is based on the life of Chris Garnder. The emotion on the face of Will Smith is the one of the best portrayals of this complex emotion we call happiness. True and pure happiness is the feeling when you, even in a crowd and when you cannot stop yourself from celebrating and feeling the bliss around. What is beautiful in this movie is a line, which Chris in his musings thinks of, a line for which we can all relate to, “It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?”

Is it not true? Happiness, the emotion we seek, we look for it here, we look for it there and more often than not, we find that it completely eludes us. All our activities, the dedication and efforts we put in at our work, the meaningful relationships we have with our family and friends, our nature to seek growth and glory, from the biggest of actions to the small activity like reading or writing this blog-post, all of it happens in us trying to attain this momentary state-of-mind, the feeling we call happiness. And yet, ironically, the minute we reach there, in-a-wink, the feeling disappears and we begin our adventure once again. What is more disheartening is the fact that in transiting from one destination to another goal so focused we are on reaching the next milestone that we completely forget to enjoy the journey.

There is so much of a power-struggle in life, it’s almost like driving on the Express-Highway and focusing only on the road, trying to overtake the other cars in front of us, but what we fail to see is the beauty of the nature beyond the edges of the road. What is more sarcastic is the fact that we think we are moving towards the next hill station, the next pinnacle of happiness, but what we fail to see is that the trees, the lakes, the farms, the mountains, they are all right there, just by the sides of the road, when we are driving through. “But Alas! We have no time to stand and stare”.

Let’s think for a minute about a situation when we are truly happy. Let’s assume you wanted something badly and you got it, and you are happy briefly, only till we think of getting something else. So did the actual happiness come because of getting the first thing, actually no, if we dig deeper, we became happy because we became free from “Want”. For that one minute of happiness, we were at peace with the Universe, we were so contented with getting what we desired, that we had no other wants. So, in that sense than, Happiness is a feeling, which doesn’t depend on what we want, it depends on how we can keep ourselves contented with what we have. Ideally, this is the real reason of happiness, but unfortunately, we attribute to the success of getting what we had aspired and move on.

I took my own-self to test and came up a list of things which will make me happy. When I did a reanalysis, I found things like fame, glory, understanding family and friends, good health, interesting work, decent money topping my list. Nevertheless, if I look beneath the surface of what truly made me happy, I realized, most of these things are needed only to gratify my ego. Getting the above things will also not keep me happy forever; I will demand more once I get these. The problem with all of us is that the society has groomed us to think that our achievements define us, and to be “successful” means to be “better”, but is that really true?

Honestly, if we look at what things would have made us happy, say during probably our 12th Standard and the first few years of college time-frame, we would have things like higher education from a prestigious university, good stable job, decent salary, some growth and recognition, and probably an understanding spouse among other things on our list. Looking back today, we would have achieved some, if not all, of those things, but are we really happy, or is that list of “things which make me happy” changed now with a hundred other things? Moreover, when we have demands from others, we put some expectations in people beyond our control, and hence the outcome of their action defines our happiness, while actually since happiness is our-state-of-mind, it should only depend on us.

If we look at the Research done by Psychologists, Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, I came across some part of their research in the book “Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell, they came to a realization that just like our emotion and state of mind determines how our facial expression will be, i.e. we smile when we are happy, and frown when we are sad, but astonishingly the exact opposite of the above is also true. If we keep smiling forcibly, we are bound to become happy and if we keep frowning forcibly, we will become sad, angry and cranky. What the above discovery reinforces is the fact that happiness comes not by actions and their outcomes, but can be generated from within.

By saying the above, I am not saying we should not put effort to achieving anything, but we shouldn’t let the outcome affect ourselves. The simplest way to put it in one line, and yet probably one of the toughest thing to implement in our life is, “Enjoy truly what you have. Strive fully for what you want, but strive with the understanding that the joy is in the striving, not just getting what you wanted. If you succeed, enjoy it again, if you don’t, still enjoy the striving.”

Final Verdict:

I am so used to writing the “Final Verdict” title in all my blog-posts that I have put the same title here as well. I wrote this post because it made me happy, I hope reading it would have made you too. I am leaving all of us (even myself, when I forget what I preach) with the above picture to remind us that “Happiness lies in our Own Hands”.

Last but not the least, a thought that suddenly struck to me, I as in the person in contention, is so very closely related to this feeling called happiness, that the way the word is spelt, in itself tells us, Happ-I-ness. The "I" is at the center of the Happiness and we cannot gain this supreme state of bliss, again spelt with "I" at its center, unless we indulge ourselves fully with this emotion.

Do drop in a comment on whether you liked the post or not. If you did, that is great, if you did not and you reached this sentence, I sure am happy you strived to reach the till the end.