Every soul seeks happiness. While happiness itself is searched for its own sake, every other goal – health, beauty, money or role, is valued, because we expect that it will make us happy. Today, we have made a lot of advancement in the eras of medical science and technology, but when it comes to attaining this blessed and beautiful state of happiness, not much has changed and we could arguably conclude that we have made no progress at all. We often end up feeling that instead of being filled with happiness, we have wasted our precious moments in anxiety and pressure to attain something, which would eventually take us to success, and then we would experience and achieve happiness. Happiness, a very natural state of being for any soul, has become very difficult to experience in the world today, because it is dependent on physical attainments and achievements.

As children, we were thrilled and happy naturally. We could share our experiences of such joys in response to simple events like hearing a bird chirping or sharing lunch with a friend in school. As we become old, we become pressurized to achieve goals like success in education, family, business and often lose awareness of the reality that it is our fundamental responsibility as a person to first become a joyous being. If we go against our own nature to be happy, we will never reach anywhere. Each of us has a picture, however vague, of what we would like to accomplish in this life. We aspire for different types of success. It could be money, health and social relationships. How close we get to attaining that goal becomes the measure for the quality of our own lives. If it remains out of reach, we feel hurt and become angry. The problem arises when we become so obsessed with it, that we stop deriving joy from the present moment. When this happens, we give up our own chances of contentment.

(To be continued tomorrow …)