On Happiness

It is January - that season that ushers in a human-made need for change in the name of resolutions.  Change is a good thing; resolutions are then not a bad segue to bring them forth. I was watching people speak of their resolutions on television, one of which caught my attention and made me ruminate. A middle-aged woman said she resolved to be more happy in this new year. And I began to think, can you will yourself to be happier?

I thought long over a ruddy sunset, and realized it is perhaps the easiest way to be happy - to resolve, pledge, want, will, desire to be happy, and remind yourself every day, that you need to be happy. Bizarre as it may sound, happiness is more of a habit, a process where you cultivate yourself - and thus a cause, rather than an effect. Many of us make the fallacy of tying happiness to outcomes, which are more often than not, few and far between, and mostly materialistic.. Then, there are that many BMWs one can buy and that many fancy tiramisus one can devour. Bring in the concept of marginal happiness and the tiramisus start tasting less and less ecstatic. All in all implying that if we are to wait for great things to happen to our lives to feel happy, we can jolly well rebrand ourselves the Homo melancholus, the sorrowful species!

What then is the alternative? The answer lies in the process - can we not ask ourselves to feel happy in our everyday lives? There goes a saying that happy people are not grateful, but grateful people are happy. If we are to be more open-minded about the little joys of everyday life, in existence itself and be grateful that these little things are present when we need them, we can feel ourselves smiling more often, the uneasiness leaching out of our souls and we turning happier. Perhaps the solution then further lies in being aware of our environs and ourselves - being mindful. If instead of thinking about the lottery we didn’t win - and which we knew we wouldn’t - we were to breathe slowly, look around and admire the ruddy colours of the setting sun, can we feel that the dusk was well spent? If instead of cribbing that the night is cold, we admire the fuzzy warmth of the blanket, can we acknowledge the hygge in the world around us?

I degrees a bit here to talk about a gyrocopter ride I took once - the gyrocopter is a small open aerial vehicle with a rotor like a chopper and makes for great short trips while you literally feel the wind in your hair. I was eager to get some amazing shots of the sea and sands from above and was gripping my canon camera excitedly when the pilot leading me to the gyro gave some sound advice - do take photos, but don’t forget to stop clicking and look at the panoramic beauty with your own eyes. I knew that mistake - carried away and desperate to clasp all the exhilaration in front of you, I have often kept on snapping photos only to end the journey with a hollow sense of dissatisfaction within - incompleteness that arose because the viewfinder can give sharp photos, but not grand memories. For that larger sense of satisfaction, you have to look at things with your own eyes, in other words be mindful of the 360 degrees around you rather than focus with one eye on a small fragment of the grandness. Even today, I remind myself of that sage advice - or memories end up in photo albums but not within you. 

The same logic perhaps applies to happiness - if we are not focusing on the moment - breathing in the west wind slowly, hueing ourselves with the blossoms of the garden or even seeking for the tinge of cardamom in the tea - the moment passes by with us stuck somewhere in the shortcomings of the past or hopeless aspirations of the future. Then, there is benefit in reminding yourself that you have to slow down, feel the day passing by and in the process feel happiness. Otherwise, life just passes by and you are left with incredible photos, but not vivid memories. To feel this euphoria, it is also important to focus away from achievement but on the achievement of the achievement. In an imperfect world, we will seldom get things the way we envisage them, leading only to more miseries - the dish we hoped to cook won’t feel Michelin starred at the end, but we can still be happy that we managed to pull the difficult feat in julienning the onions and dicing the potatoes. Mind you, it’s good to be ambitious and perfect, but you can’t have the same standards in every single ask everyday, or you will end up in bleak burnout - the bowstring can’t be pulled taut all the time! 

So handpick the waterloos that can’t be lost, the rest should be all about sweet sunset chais, cloudy day poetry and the smell of marigolds. There’s beauty in simplicity, and happiness in every corner - the catch is you have to look out for it, or it will scamper away in your forlorn grumpiness bedecked in ambition and wants. 

Then, go ahead - make that resolution, let’s take a deep breathe and be more receptive to happiness. As one of my colleagues once mentioned - when we were dissecting theologically and philosophically the purpose of our existence - the purpose of life is to be happy, and make others happy : if we can achieve even this much or rather, this little, the day was made worthwhile. 

Existentialism - tick, Optimism - tick, the rest, along with the dictionary can definitely wait. The tea is sweet.

23rd Jan’ 2021