Happiness - What’s that like????

Happiness - state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy (As defined in oxford dictionary)

What do I think is happiness??? Is the question I have asked myself a zillion times (I hope that’s a valid word!!). We all have a self assumed goal or a dream and we work zealously towards its achievement. We work like dogs, sweat it out, slave it out, plan every single day to the tiniest detail to get the best out of it and at the end tell ourselves “yes I have succeeded!” .but what is truly the end of the road??? What do we expect from success? Hopefully you must have answered “happiness” (coz that’s the title!)

At times I find it very amusing that people who live on streets, who never know what tomorrow is going to bring them, who do not even have a shelter to protect themselves from the ravages of nature, seem so blissfully content with their lives while a man with all the luxury in the world takes a 100 pills a day for high blood pressure and insomnia…the sad irony of life I think is that the more you have the more you worry about how to protect all that you have earned. A person’s lifetime is valued based on the materialistic gain rather than intellectual gain or work done for the cause of social well being.

Success of course in the most generic term refers to monetary, emotional and intellectual fulfillment but I don think I have ever come across a person however successful they are to accept that they have attained such a fulfillment. It is always the question of I wish I had some more (someone asks u for 3 wishes n u ask for a thousand more).When did man become like this??? Or has he always been like this…
May be an imaginary conversation between 2 cavemen would have gone like this

Caveman 1: I killed 2 mammoths today…it will suffice for the whole year
Caveman 2: hmmm I don know…what if the ice melts and all our storage goes waste??? We should not stop hunting!

We always plan for every contingency…We do amazing risk analysis and come up with the most startling results… “Oh in about 40 years from now we may never be able to get a seat for our grand children in any educational institution so let us book a seat now!!” yes life has become THAT ridiculous!! We panic about something that’s going to happen after 200 years…

We have forgotten to live in the present, to savor the relationships we have NOW…We have forgotten to say “I’m happy!”. We have forgotten to relish the small things in life like getting drenched in the rain, going for a ride on a giant wheel, eating mom’s home made samosas on a rainy day…. Coz “we jus don have the time for such triviality”!!(Yeah right!)It is sad that humankind is chasing the rainbow of the future yet never realizing that reality is pretty gr8 too!!

“Happiness is not enough for me…I demand euphoria!”
-May be this quote from Calvin defines the whole of humanity