Strings of Happiness

I feel I am much happier and at peace with myself in my thirties (well early thirties!) than I was ever in my twenties and this is not because things around me are working miraculously in my favor. No that is not true at all. It is just because I have started thinking differently and that has helped me a lot.

I always used to get good marks in school. Even in college and in my further education I had done extremely well in terms of getting good grades but there was so much I completely missed out on which I didn’t even realize till I was 23-24.

While growing up there is so much emphasis given on “education” and yet as grownups, we are lost. No one teaches us about accepting failure and moving on, taking risks, dealing with trauma, dealing with political/judgmental/calculative people, adapting to change, dealing with competition, overcoming fear, handling stressful situations, adjusting to change, anxiety and actually many more such life skills.  

Many people feel that you learn these skills as you grow up through experience and as and when you face certain situations. So there is no need to teach this. Well that means if a person is naturally good at handling tough situations or dealing with change, then he/she will do so in the future...…but what about others?

We don’t apply the same logic for math, science or languages. Intact if a kid is not good at a particular subject then we make sure that he/she spends more time learning and reading about it. Then why not spend some time reading, learning, educating about these skills which are directly connected to your happiness.  

I am no expert on this topic of being happy and neither am I always in this state of happiness (well that is impossible) but this is what I have realized over the past few years.

There is a long straight road that has many goal posts along the way. Somehow these goal posts define our level of success and happiness. As we travel along this journey we are expected to collect a few things so that we can reach these goal posts.

Things like owning a big house, big car, getting married, looking thin and beautiful, becoming a manager/director, having kids, luxurious vacations etc. And no you can’t reach these goalposts as and when you want. These goal posts come with a timeline attached to it. Now, neither this timeline nor the things to be achieved at these goalposts are set by us. It is some unknown people/society who sets them and we take it as a benchmark. Some people reach all these goalposts with the specified timeline but there are many who don’t and then there is unhappiness, depression, anxiety, stress, anger and frustration. The starting point for every person is different and yet we all have this aim for the same goalposts within the same timeframe.

I feel we need to look at this road with goalposts from a different point of view. There may be times when we can’t reach a goalpost because we get hurt while walking and we reach the goalpost later. There may be times when the road is blocked, we can’t go straight so we need to find another route. While finding this another route, we may have to entirely skip one or 2 goalposts. There may be times when the road is blocked and we just have to wait and wait for a longer time to reach there. There may be situations where we can’t walk so we need to learn other skills like jumping, running, crawling. There are going to be times when our friends or other family members will reach these goalposts earlier than we do but then later we realize that may be we have explored a little more interesting things while taking that different curvy route.

Another worst thing I feel about these goalposts is that, most of the time, we don’t even care about them. We just want to reach there on time to impress others and have a perfect image of ourselves in front of them. Sadly, others are doing the same thing to impress us and have a perfect image of themselves. So in this crazy world of creating a perfect image, everyone is losing out on happiness.

I am not trying to say that we should have low aim and be content with what we have. Of course we need to be focused about what we want and put in a lot of efforts to achieve it. But we need to define our own goalposts and our own timeline for it. We don’t need to sacrifice our happiness in this journey.

Now this might sound crazy but our happiness is really not dependent on the phase we are going through, external situations or other people. “She behaved this way ...so I am unhappy, “I don’t have a job…so I am unhappy” … I failed in my exam…so I am unhappy… I am not well …so I am unhappy” I agree that to some extent it is true, but not entirely. Nothing can make us unhappy without our permission. Over the past few years I have made conscience effort of not letting others pull my strings of happiness and I would say at least to some extent I have achieved it