Thursday 14 November 2013

THREE PORTRAITS OF HAPPINESS


At the beginning and end of the day, we all want to be happy; but ask yourself honestly, and you shall discover, you don’t have the final answer as yet (or, may be you already have!). From birth till death, in the life of a person, this aspect keeps on recurring, without a final resolution.  The truth is; complete happiness is perhaps attainable only in a state of either complete attachment or detachment from the externals, and internal interplays; encountered in and during the course of our conscious transactions as a being. However, it is a desirable, near-attainable but is asocial and hence; utopian. Personally though, one can have it to varied degrees through efforts. 

The feeling of happiness is relative to what we want and what we get, constrained by the environment, situations, events and the measure of our willingness to find it. The infinite layers of happiness that we wear, are our becoming and own making, to a great extent. This is an individualistic phenomenon without any finality or limit about it. Each one of us is different from the other, in terms of its realization and how happy we are in the process. Happiness is also dependent on our own psychosomatic makeup and is cultivable. It is a crude and finer aspect of our life. When added up, happiness could be a collective existential phenomena. 


For earning happiness, the easiest way, is to seek pleasure and we are programmed for that. Go for the pleasures and maximize them, in your pursuits of happiness; knowing fully well that soon, your pleasures would turn into your pains as well. Pleasure, at the rudimentary or crude levels, only can make you happy but, soon you will discover that as a happy person, you need more of it. Well, that is your rights and you should happy and full in life. 

At times, the conditions of pleasures remain no more valid, if you have outgrown yourselves. Pleasures are satiable commodities and require constant replenishment. You have to shift your stance constantly to have more or newer kinds of pleasures to remain happy, though not at the cost of others and your own welfare. As derivatives, these pleasures could generate lots of derivatives, to demotivate you or make you enter the piers of pains and suffering. Many of us make the habits of living in the slices of these pains to become happy or making our loved ones happy. Such actions take us to degeneration and destruction, if we fail to rescue ourselves before it is too late. However, we can avoid the pains and tribulations encountered directly or as the byproducts of pleasures sought, by seeking much and following myriad paths. We too can feel containment, when it is based on selfless action. A way-out from this labyrinth is to tread in the middle of the highroads of pleasure and pain, by having both and by remaining near satisfied with the existing situations or not by expanding the scope further and farther. It is not complete inertia but the acceptance of the inevitability and limitation.

Basically, there are three main types of happy persons:

THE ORDINARY PERSON
The very ordinary and most common person fits into this category, who often spends life as an anonymous and faceless entity. Such a person does not claim or proclaim his/her wealth, knowledge, status, fame or name before others. For them the power, prestige and property factors of happiness are muted or remain the non-factors of life. Such a happy person do not also question too much of life and living or compares himself/herself to get ahead of the others. Accepting the conditions that cannot be changed he/she adjust the emerging realities. This happy person devotes more time in following than leading. He/she lives in the tradition by accommodating the roles expected of. This person is happy by default and detente. 

THE SUCCESSFUL PERSON
By walking on the roads of extremities, one can only become happy for a very short period of time. After reaching plenty many summits, this happy person finds himself/herself unfulfilled and therefore, turn to other means to prove his/her importance in the mundane and material world. Here, happiness is a condition of entrapment and enjoyment; largely perceived as success. This happy person creates wealth, power and prestige as examples to be emulated by rest of us. In the ultimate analysis, this happy person is the one, who turns to the ordinary and successful persons to have a privileged glimpse of happiness at the end of the day. Days come in his/her life, when he/she discovers that all the gains are redundant as it cannot fetch tons of happiness any more. He/she, then sheds the prides and retreats to a space of enforced commonality. 

THE EXTRA-ORDINARY PERSON
Far away from the ordinary and successful crowds, we have another happy person who is the creative thinker. With enormous and diverse creative and intellectual prowess, he/she tries to define the non-material and extraordinary notions of success and happiness. His/her prescriptions and strategies  to feel happy are nice but cannot be translated into realities. This becomes apparent during his/her heightened life-time or beyond by others. This happy individual creates the webs of happiness and then feels trapped. He/she too, dwells in an enclosure of makeshift happiness, in abject isolation. Exhausted of happiness, he/she secretly concludes that, a return to the insignificant ordinary or the significant success category is a no-fuss solution. 

THE CRUX
As we are happy in our freedoms, wealth and intellects; so also we can be happy in our bondage, paucity and voids; though, it is better to combine all of these into a specially tailor-made and livable reality of our own perception as happiness, not questioned by others, as aberration. However, happiness is to be sought as a lifelong vocation and shared with others.

Tell me, happiness is never or forever and/or which category you belong to?