Happiness..

Happiness is an emotion in which one experience feelings like satisfaction or intense joy. This is the definition that one can find about happiness. But then, how do you get such an experience? That is, how do you become happy?

For me, when I was in school, getting good marks in exam would have made me happy. When I was in college, getting a good job would have made me happy. Now when I am working at a place, the amount of money that I earn is making me happy. So to make it very clear happiness would be an emotion that you get when your desires are fulfilled.

Happiness is something that everyone likes. It’s an emotion that everyone would want to have. The next question would be how can you be happy always? Is there any way to satisfy all your desires? There will be many desires of yours which will not be satisfied even if you try for it. It would give results, but then, might be late which will make you sad. ‘Sadness’ is another emotion without which we would have never known the good feeling of happiness.

Happiness depends on a person’s perspective, the way in which he looks towards his life. As its told in Buddhism, desire is the cause of misery. So if you do not have any desire, then you can be happy. But as a normal human being its very difficult to live without having desires. If you do not have any desire, then you might find your life meaningless or purposeless. Here you have a contradiction. What next? You have a desire and you want to be happy. But if your desire is not satisfied, obviously you are unhappy. So what can be done is change the way you look at your desire. The happiness that you get by satisfying a desire is always short lived.
I needed a bike… I get a bike... I am happy… Now I want a car… I am sad, I don’t have it and I have no means to buy it… So when you consider life, expect this to happen always. So if one desire is not met, the only thing that you have to think is, the happiness that I would have got from that would have been for very short time, and obviously I am going to get a bigger desire.

Now going to perspective, if you are sad you can be happy. Just consider sadness as mere emotion. If you are a person believing in god, then you can take this emotion as something which helps to remind you about god. Because generally it is during sadness that we remember god. So you should be happy that the sad emotion that you have gave an opportunity for you to think about almighty god which in turn is good for you. Another example that I can give about the changing perspective would be, not to think that you will be happy if you are desires are satisfied or mould your desire in such a way that its about something selfless. Let it be something like, I am happy when the child who begs everyday in front of the temple gets one time good meal. This would give you some purpose in your life and also it helps to make you happy which is not short lived. Another way of being happy is to change the way in which you look at life in adversities. An example for this would be, T A Edison calling his wife to show her a once in a life time seen, which is his factory caught in fire and turning to ashes. It was an adversity, but the way he looks into it is different.

The happiness that we get from the worldly things is always short lived. At the end of life when you retrospect your life, then you will find that, you have not gained anything significant after a long life. The things about which you were sad were of least importance for you. So whenever you are sad, put yourself in a position of an old man thinking about his past life, and think how much importance you will have then, for the incident that made you sad now. Finally as its told in Bhagwat Gita, "Everything happens for good in your life", so just believe in this and happiness is yours.

P.S. Read at your own risk