Being Simply Happy

“ What do you crave most in your life? “ asked my friend, as we sat in leisure after so many years (15 years of married life), sipping tea at one of our favourite haunts of our past. “Well nostalgic moments like this one,” I promptly answered. “ I would always like to relive all such moments and every time it would be an equally delightful experience for me, because I feel happiness is something that you can get only out of things that are close to your heart.” I earnestly expressed. “Your material achievements, your professional success can surely give your ego some satisfaction and momentary joy, but these things fail to hand you pure happiness. At any stage of life, your ‘real natural self’ does not need big things to keep you happy. Only simpler things can see most of us in paradise.” I stressed.

My friend looked at me with surprise writ large on her face and I had to elaborate, “I really mean it, in spite of ascending on the exciting life ladder, simple things continue to remain my objects of happiness. The refreshing feel of a beautiful crisp, winter morning, the smell of the first raindrops hitting sun baked earth, percolating coffee, moments spent with family, nostalgic moments with friends, a romantic song heard far off, wearing an old favourite shirt, all such simple things make me very happy and hence happiness perhaps is always handy for me.” I feel that whatever I had expressed to her was applicable to most of us and not just myself.

Life is an evolution, where we evolve from a playful child to a bubbling adolescent and finally to a matured adult, but I think all this evolution is a state of mind, our heart continues to sing to the tunes of simple yet sentimental strings. My octogenarian grandma still finds her old age the happiest phase of her life for according to her; she hasn’t let the mischievous child, the active teenager, the romantic lover, the amicable friend and other ‘people‘ in her die with age. At heart, she still keeps close with all these ‘persons’ in her, and hence her happiness is still cloudless.

In our unbridled pursuit of pleasures and ambitions, most of us make our simple lives complicated, disturbing the ‘ecological balance ‘of our evergreen hearts. We spoil the very simple yet beautiful geometry of our hearts. We race for things that we feel can give us immense joy, and start grossly neglecting very simple things in our lives, which can unearth fountains of bliss for us. Life is simple mathematics where one plus one should always be two, but in our longing for more we try to make it twenty two or more; most of us end up with plenty of zeroes added to the end. We must learn to get this ‘beautiful two’ out of our lives.

Children are always ecstatic, because they have very simple definitions of happiness; they straightaway derive it from their routine child’s play. With the passage of time, most of us end up with ‘complex definition’ and ‘modified concepts’ of happiness. In the process, we lose our natural capacity to become simply happy. Unconsciously we become what I term as ‘joyless prone’ and ‘happiness resistant‘, so simpler things don’t give us felicity. We need to look for a long lasting happiness, which can only be drawn from the simpler things in life, simple yet close to our hearts. I feel true happiness is something we can only get through moments close to our heart. Let us try to gather and experience such moments. For all such moments should keep us ‘simply’ happy… forever.