Category: Life

Happiness is overrated

Neera

Why is everyone so obsessed with being happy?

Why can’t we accept that happiness is a feeling which comes and goes just like sadness, anger, love, and frustration?

None of these feelings last forever, not even love.

Why would happiness?

How many of us have stayed in a state of bliss forever? We all have experienced joy from time to time, but it disappears. Then we are back to our default state, whatever that is for each one of us. For many of us, it is melancholy.

Some of us are happy, being sad.

So much so that we try to hide our happiness because we are too afraid that misery is just around the corner, waiting to step in as soon as she finds the door ajar.

Often we blame circumstances for our unhappiness, while happiness is an inner state of mind and is independent of outer conditions. Many people have turned their grief into creative pursuits and created something beautiful out of their unhappiness.

Elizabeth Gilbert just released a new book, ‘City of Girls’ that she wrote in the grieving months just after her partner’s death.

Red Symons’(an Australian comedian) son, had brain cancer at four. At that time, the famous show ‘Hey Hey Saturday’ featuring Red Symons had just started. Red used comedy as a relief to deal with the blow of fate. He decided to stay happy and live life no matter what fate had thrown at him.

After spending a year in search of happiness, Gretchen Rubin wrote in her book ‘The Happiness Project,’

“It’s about living in the moment and appreciating the smallest things. Surrounding yourself with the things that inspire you and letting go of the obsessions that want to take over your mind. It is a daily struggle sometimes and hard work, but happiness begins with your own attitude and how you look at the world.”

She says:

“When I find myself focusing too much on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to ‘Enjoy now’. If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future.”

The fact is we are guilty of inviting unhappiness into our lives. There are three reasons for that.

  1. Our belief system. We think that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish. To get the glory, we act unhappy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly light-hearted. It’s easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied.” Meaning being happy is a lot of work, while being sad is easy. As Seth Godin puts it, “Doom is inevitable, gloom is optional.”
  2. Our paradox of expectations. We want to change ourselves, but we also want to accept ourselves for what we are. We want to be merry-go-lucky, but we also want to take ourselves seriously. We want to be disciplined, but we also want to wander, play, and read at whim. We are always on the edge of agitation; we want to let go of envy and anxiety, yet keep our energy and ambition. What we don’t get is we can do anything we want, but not everything we want.
  3. Our occupation. For the last four centuries, we have abandoned creativity from our lives. In 1600, before the industrial revolution, everyone lived their creativity when there were no proper jobs. A bread-maker baked bread, a seamstress sewed clothes, a blacksmith made tools, and a cobbler made shoes. They all worked with their hands to create something that provided them with a living and gratification from their work.

Today most of the jobs are left-brain jobs. Jobs consisting of following processes, solving problems, and working in the assembly line. They might pay well, but they don’t bring the satisfaction the creative work brings. 

No wonder in survey after survey, most people express their desire to quit their jobs to do something they are passionate about. They are seeking contentment from their work, which comes from creativity.

Being creative is being happy, and being happy is being creative.

Most people are happiest when they are engrossed in a creative activity.

Creativity doesn’t belong to artists, but it exists in every field. A farmer can be as creative as a mason or a hotel receptionist who makes her guest feel welcome in a creative way.

To invite happiness into your life, change your beliefs, lower your expectations, and be creative.

Aunt Grace’s Philosophy

Neera

Many years ago I read a story that impacted me so much that I wrote it down in my journal. Recently, while going through old notebooks, I read it and it hit the cord in me again. I have to share it with you.

It originally appeared in Reader’s Digest.

The writer Nardi Reeder Campion describes a time in her life when she was down in the dumps and discovered a diary that had been kept more than forty years before by a maiden aunt who had gone through some bad times herself.

Aunt Grace had been poor, frail, and forced to live with relatives. “I know I must be cheerful,” she wrote, “living in this large family upon whom I am dependent. Yet gloom haunts me. Clearly, my situation will not change; therefore, I shall have to change.”

To help her hold her fragile world together, Aunt Grace resolved to do six things every day:

  • Something for someone else
  • Something for herself
  • Something she didn’t want to do that needed doing
  • A physical exercise
  • A mental exercise
  • An original prayer that always included counting her blessings

These six things help change Nardi’s life as they had helped change Aunt Grace’s life many years before

“Can life be lived by a formula?” Nardi asks herself in the article. “All I know is that since I started to live by those six precepts, I’ve become more involved with others and hence less ‘buried’ in myself.”

Ever since I read this story, Aunt Grace’s motto, ‘Bloom where you are planted’ has become my motto too.

A sketch a day

Neera

In primary school, we had a teacher who taught us drawing. In his eighties, he wore a white kurta-pajama, a white turban, and a white open beard. A gentle soul, he taught us how to draw basic shapes, use a ruler properly and draw still-life and landscapes.

Children didn’t take his class seriously. For them, it was a fun period, a time to talk, laugh, and throw paper planes at each other. To get us interested in drawing, he once told us a story that I still remember.

One of his students migrated to Canada, where he couldn’t find a job for months. A career counselor asked him what he can do. After thinking for a long time, he threw his hands in the air and said, “I can write my name in different ways.” He then showed the counselor the little calligraphy he learned in this drawing teacher’s class. Soon he was hired as a signboard writer.

It took me years to realize that, that humble man had instilled in me the love of drawing. I enjoyed illustrations so much that it became the reason that I chose biology for further studies. This passion lay dormant until a few years ago when I took a drawing class and had time of my life doing life drawing.

Recently I found a sketch a day challenge and got sucked in.

Why I started this blog

Neera 2 Comments

Most blogs have an enchanting founding story. Stories like:

A charming law graduate quit her job to travel and write; she is now eating her way around the world.

An industrial engineer and ex-employee of General Motors and Walt Disney World started a blog after having her first child and teaching other mums how to earn through blogging.

A depressed artist healed herself by teaching art through her blog.

The start of my blog wasn’t anything like that.

I have been writing since 2001 but didn’t have the courage to put my work out there. Not only that, I couldn’t even call myself a writer. Even though I had filled notebook after notebook in eighteen years of writing, I thought of myself as a failure.

My writing was not good enough. I had nothing to show for years of toil. I had published nothing. My name was not on the cover of any book. Not even at the top of a magazine article.

My writing buddies liked my stories, but I thought they were being polite and never considered entering my stories into any writing competition.

I kept on seeing myself as a failure and tortured myself mercilessly. I would set myself unrealistic writing goals and would beat myself for not meeting them.

My ‘job’ was taking up all my energy, and the rest was consumed in keeping the house and raising the family.

Something in me was dying, and I knew I have to do something. All I wanted to do was to write. Writing had become a compulsion for me. But I was too scared to put my work out there.

After weeks of agonizing, I bought my domain name. Something terrible happened on that day. My father passed away.

The next couple of weeks were full of confusion, numbness, guilt, and grief. In those days, I wrote madly, capturing every single thread of memory that came to the surface. Writing was my savior, as it was when my mother passed away three years earlier.

As I went through various stages of grief, I realized ‘writing’ was the only true tribute I could pay to my parents, who instilled in me a love for learning. They were both teachers. I felt compelled to tell their story, and through them, my story.

There was another powerful reaction. Their departure brought me face-to-face with my mortality.

How long was I going to live?

My time here is limited, and yet I was postponing my life. When will I live the life I really wanted to live? Was I prepared to die one day without even finding out what would have happened if I had followed my dream to become a full-time writer?

I wasn’t.

Hence this blog.