Bedu Pako Baramasa - arr. Meghan Quinlan

THE PROBLEM WITH HAPPINESS IS..

THE PROBLEM WITH HAPPINESS IS..

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The problem with happiness is that you are fine till you find it. Our whole life is a journey in search of happiness but we don’t know what happiness is. A normal life would be just fine and if fact is just fine but we are not ‘happy’ with it. We want to be happy but do not know what makes us happy. A good job, a good house, a good meal, a good night sleep, a caring spouse, loving kids- we have all of them and we are just fine with them but we want happiness. If all this is not, what happiness is? 



Okay, life is just fine but not fine enough to make us really happy. Really happy?  What is that? Oh, I need a big car. Sure enough, save some money, take some loan and have a car. Are you happy now? You wanted a big car and you have it, so you should be really happy. You were just fine with that old small car of yours, it was running, wasn’t it? You found your new car and thought you will be happy but you are just fine only. The statuesque remains. It is the same thing when we have a bigger house, a holiday to a most aspired destination or with a large Bank balance. Will having more cars, more houses, more holidays, and more bank balance help? Does not look so. People already having all these are also feeling just fine.

The so called happiness lingers for a while but sooner than later we return to where we started from. This is about finding happiness in material possessions.

Let us talk about finding happiness in spiritual journey. The world we live in is not real. Our real purpose in life is to find happiness within and for that we need to cultivate spiritual longings. We immerse ourselves in scriptures and Yoga. We visit temples and all religious shrines in search of the happiness. We do find some peace when we are in the temples or in the company of the learned saints but that is all. After a while the feeling of just fine returns. Where has the happiness gone? Will more time in the temples and with the saints help? Does not look so. People who are here for years look just fine if not bored.

The question therefore is why are we running after happiness if being just fine is what we are going get after the long race? We are already just fine, is not that good enough? 

Text Verdurian Hari Lakhera

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EXPERIENCE COMES WITH AGE (?)

EXPERIENCE COMES WITH AGE (?)

Not necessarily, I think. Then what else becomes experience? Of course age is important in the sense that as we grow in years we have the opportunity to try and observe many things in our life time. Experience as per dictionary is Personal trial; Continued observation; knowledge gained by trial and observation; Trial and knowledge from suffering and enjoyment; suffering itself. Age is the number of years a person gas lived.

Let us go back to our childhood and formatting years at home and at school and college. As a child, as we now know, everything was new to us and we asked questions and more questions. Most of these questions and the answers we got were beyond our comprehension but we took those answers for granted because we trusted the people who answered them- our parents and teachers. This experience  in the form of answers were to be tried by us in our coming life.

Let us now look at the experience we gained in our working life. We have worked in our chosen field of training or choice as engineers, doctors, accountants, salesmen, clerks, managers, actors, artists, politician, and bureaucrats and so on. We came across many events that took place during our work span. We call all these events as experience based on our observations and trials.

Let us also look at the events that took place outside our field of work.  There were many events in family, neighborhood and elsewhere.

All these trials and observations called experiences prepare us to react suitably to similar situations in future. These experiences become the yardstick for our belief. Younger generation looks up to their elders for advice in times of need because of their experience.

Many of us failed to try and observe the events that happened around us in the years we have lived so far and many of us again have different experience on similar events and therefore different reactions and solutions. The younger generation look up for answers and we have none or we have some vague answers. They start doubting us. We call it generation gap. We forget that trials and observations are ongoing processes and we cannot say this far and no more  as long as our mental faculties are in place.   

Age, therefore, has nothing to do with experience. A younger man/woman may have more experience than an old man because the former took interest in events happening around him and the latter didn’t. Some of us are tremendously gifted and have vried experience but some of us  limited our trials and observations to our field of work and family and did not bother to go beyond that. Our lack of interest in things that did not bring us money or fulfill our selfish ends resulted into a huge deficit of experience. If this is true, it is our duty to tell our children to look outward and gain as much experience as possible, develop interests other than that give them money and personally gain the experience. A little bit of experiencing sufferings will help in understanding what suffering is.