Gratitude, Self-love and Happiness
"Happiness is overrated. How could it be? How could it be not?"
Look in each and every face visible online on social media or on glossy pages of magazines and newspapers. Beautiful faces with the perfect body of amazon or the chiseled body of Spartan, they are still in vogue. Their charming smile haloed by the “celebritism” still mesmerizes the eyes and ignites the greed to have something similar. They represent the epitome of success. The sweet smell of happiness within the success beckons not only the unsuspecting mind but also the intellectual
Consumerism has driven greed. The greed to earn more money and spend more. Cosmetics, apparel, and outer image enhanced with social media like Instagram and Snapchat. They claim they can impart to your happiness forever. There is always competition to be the new hype, author of the next viral item (video or photo) and yet it never seems to end. As long as people know how to gossip as they have been doing since the stone age, the so-called trend will continue to be so. They will continue to pursue the halo of happiness akin to the sun as Icarus did. Eventually, they will fall, like he did.
True happiness exists. People are not dumb and nor conceited. Eventually, they will be tired of all the cooked-up anecdotes and facades. As said by ancient sage, all this is Samsara or Maya, the circle of desires. Break the circle and you will find true freedom. You will know what happiness means. That is the happiness in self. We are the progenitor and the destroyer. So be true to yourself. If you want to love, love unselfishly, don’t pluck the flower i.e. beautiful, but water it every day, take care of it. When you do that you will also be taking care of your inner self, day by day, cultivating love.
Happiness is momentary. Content on having what we have does away sufferings. Suffering is antithetic to happiness. We suffer because we care even that which has no significance. If you want to care, care about the hungry, the poor, the weak, and yourself. There are enough things to be cared for. We need to cultivate our own happiness which is independent of others. We need to learn to love. Love the air we breathe, savor the experience of each moment- moment by moment.
All of us are blessed by time regardless of who we are, where we are, and when we are. By giving importance to small moments of life, we can cultivate gratitude. Gratitude to be born and experience joy, woe, boredom, ugliness, and goodness of life. Gratitude to enjoy diversity in music, food, knowledge, company of friends, and all the facets of human endeavor. Gratitude to be an ignorant struggling to reach the pedestal of a savant. Gratitude for being educated enough to understand the world and be part of it. Gratitude is the golden brick road towards the Emerald city of happiness. Walking alone or with friends as strange as us, we eventually will reach it
Or perhaps happiness is not a destination. It is just the sanctuaries of respite for the learned and ignorant, poor and rich, all the living who are on their journey to find the meaning of their existence. Happiness showers us with colors, the light to see the beautiful. To see beautiful, we need to love. Love not only can be seen but especially can only be felt. We are feeling people; emotions are what make us who we are. Most of us believe jealousy, sadness, hate, cruelty, and ‘negative’ feelings are bad. In a way, it is. But it is natural to be jealous, to feel sad, and sometimes feel hatred. Cruelty also comes when life is grim and failures are your best buddies
Yet, we need to shower ourselves with love and kindness. We need to understand we can be better than petty feelings of jealousy. Mistakes may happen but we should never be cruel to ourselves and others who wish well for us. Others are as imperfect as we and people will continue to come, they will love you, or hurt you and will exit from your life. We need to remember it is us, our ‘ego” called “me” who stays always. From birth till death do us apart or maybe even after death, I will be with me and you with you. The beauty defined by ‘others’ is never accurate for it varies from person to person. What I am is beautiful, believe it and move on
If we want to compare, we can compare how happy we are. How fulfilled our life is? How glad I was and am? Let’s compare our past to the present rather than with others whom we can never comprehend even after lifetimes. By practicing gratitude by savoring each moment and loving ourselves the good and bad’ unselfishly, we can hope to bring happiness to our 'short' life and make the gray world brighter and beautiful to live in.
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