Happiness doesn’t need a pursuit....

With all due respect to the movie from which I have heavily borrowed the title (it stands as one of my all time favourites), in the words below I will bring forward the small epiphany I had a few days ago.

It was at the convocation at the host University of my Summer Internship, in a foreign land that I had one of those moments of truth which strike you so powerfully in the essence of their overwhelming simplicity. I had been invited graciously by my lab phD scholars who were receiving their degrees despite knowing me for just 1-2 weeks. I was supposed to be accompanied by a visiting faculty from India whom I knew somewhat.  But due to some delay on my part, I ended up going alone to the venue and try as I might, I couldn’t locate sir there. As a result I had to sit alone after waving to the scholars and waited for the ceremony to begin. Leafing through the convocation booklet, I felt really stupid to have left work at lab for this ceremony; all decked up in my formals and yet had no one to talk to. Just then my eyes caught something and that reminded me of why I wanted to be here in the first place. The sight of so many happy faces of families and friends cheering up their loved ones, pride shining in their eyes, filled me with happiness. This was maybe my first attempt at trying to be happy for someone else and yet I discovered that it filled me with an equal happiness.

It may seem incredulous at first. How can one hope to find happiness in a hall full of strangers? Well I did successfully. Maybe it helped me imagine my family and friends at my graduation two years from now. Maybe seeing grandparents, frail as they may be, trying to put their strength into cheering up their grandsons and daughters, helped me realise that families are same regardless of whichever part of the world they may belong to. Maybe seeing the huge international cultural consortium that had gathered at the venue, Indians, Chinese, African, Arabic, English alike, built in me a new respect for Canada’s tolerant and welcoming educational culture. Maybe the selfie taken by a student with the provost that made the hall ring with laughter gave me some mischievous ideas myself! Barring my two lab scholars, all those who graduated were strangers to me, yet being a part of their achievement, in that hall which had smiles written all over, made me realise the biggest thing of all- that happiness in indeed contagious. 

At the start of any day, we do not mark it as a quest for happiness, yet when we have time to sit and contemplate, the moments we clearly remember are those that brought a smile to our faces. The joke of a lab technician, a stolen look at your lover’s photo and maybe a hurried shy conversation during work, the rainbow in the soapy bubbles of the dishes you are cleaning, a great big sale you chanced upon or maybe a free lunch (and here I would emphasize that there are indeed free lunches in the world as long as you have true friends!). We did not go looking for these moments and yet they filled our hearts with happiness.

Happiness is not worrying about how one can be happier. It requires letting go of all preoccupations and preconceptions that cloud one before the start of any day. One’s mind has to be truly devoid of all disturbing thoughts and have a welcoming embrace for absorbing the myriad forms in which happiness is present around us. 

A friend recently remarked,

“You think a lot altogether and it makes you look troubled, but when you laugh, you look like a baby!”

I was taken aback; it was the first time someone had described my laughter in such a manner (nothing against babies but I don’t like to be called one!). But upon retrospection I realized that it is not just me. However troubled we might be, all it takes is a great big laugh, full of happiness, to transform us for a moment into innocent babies. Nobody recognizes and expresses happiness better than babies- that I give them. It is the beauty of happiness, the innocence of it that brings out the baby in us momentarily. It is this baby that we so tirelessly seek, failing to recognize that it resides within us, just bursting to come to surface.

Happiness may have several albeit even twisted versions- the psychopath finds it in his next successful kill, a mother finds hers in her child, a homeless may find it at a roadside fire on a cold night. Yet I feel that this is the only feeling that in essence is pure- at that moment you are just happy and nothing else. You can be affectionate, possessive and weak in love, you can be spiteful, rebellious and arrogant in hate and you can be mourning and frail in sadness. But when you are happy, you are just that. It may be called as being joyful, cheerful and many other things, but they all are not different in themselves.

If a time were to come when, just for a few moments, everyone on this planet would feel their own moments of happiness at the same time; it would be one of those rarest flickers of time in which humanity would be united. Such is the power of happiness. We have oft heard about the ancient religious scriptures telling us that it was a waste of time to run after material things and men foolishly embodied them as happiness. What I now conclude from here are my own sermonic words – stop looking for happiness, only then can you truly find it and thereby it doesn’t need a long and hefty pursuit.

“If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,

If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,

If you’re happy and you know it and you really want to show it,

If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands!!”