At a friend’s housewarming party, I asked a young teenager what he wanted to be when he would grow up? His reply stunned me. He simply said, “I want to be a happy person”. A happy person? Isn’t that given? I was puzzled. My question stayed. But I let it be given the mood of the day.
Months later, I again met the boy and asked him what he meant that day. His explanation, “Mom and Dad go to big offices. We have two cars at home. But somehow they always seem sad. I want to be a happy person when I grow up.”
How simple was it for him to say that? And how deep his simple words carried. Often, we think of our long term goals as “in the long run, I want to own a car..Or in the long run, I want to be a head of a Blah-Blah business…Or in the long run, I want to be a millionaire” But we never think of being ‘happy’ as a goal in itself. Is it a given? Or is being happy taken to be an after effect of achieving these long term goals? If it is the former, then the other long run goals become redundant 🙂 And if its the latter, then does it mean that we live unhappily till those long term goals are achieved?
A lot of us keep happiness not as a goal but as an after effect. With the result, the cause keeps changing and the happiness keeps eluding us. There are always things in life which pull us down and there are times when its just not possible to be happy. But barring that, I have also met people who try to find the slightest excuse of being sad. And that to me, is a real cause of concern. For shouldn’t being happy be as subconscious a decision as being alive?
I read this somewhere :
Every night before sleeping, try to think/pen down one moment of happiness of the day..And before you realize, how small moments of joy make life worthwhile 🙂
Disha's Writings 