Bon Voyage!

Among the plethora of people, with different personality types & traits, we see, meet and interact with every day, have you ever wondered why some seem really happy, some seem doing just alright, and some outright upset, unhappy, frustrated and sad. I always wondered what is it that makes people happy or sad about life?  What is that one thing or driving factor that makes it a smooth sail for some and a turbulent ride for others? Happiness always allured me as a mystical phenomenon in need for a logical explanation.  It always baffled me and I often caught myself thinking about the secret sauce, the formula, almost like a clandestine magic which ‘happy people’ knew, since I was a kid! It was easy for me to lean into thinking that the circumstances of ‘happy people’ were rather more favorable than others and they were just plain lucky to have landed in a happy spot, like a child born with the silver spoon.  But then as time passed I met people from different walks of life, I saw people surrounded with luxuries and wealth still not happy and deep down miserable due to some odd situation in their life, which proved my theory of happiness wrong. Time and again I met few others who were in the most distressing situations and still glowing with an aura of calm, peace & happiness. What did they have to make them so contented? The puzzle grew more and more complicated as I tried to put the pieces together.

After going through several ups and downs, goods and bads and failures and wins of life myself in the past several years, and after thinking through the ‘mechanism’ for many a years, I have reached the conclusion that Happiness, the highly desired phenomenon that we all want to experience and associate ourselves with every single day of our life, is a ‘PURSUIT’. It is not something that happens to us overnight rather it is a state we condition our mind into through mindful efforts and decision making every step of the way. Happiness is a ‘conscious decision’, an agreement that the mind & soul makes with the body to go on a mental journey together, to find peace, to find joy, to find bliss!  Certainly, there is not one thing and no one factor which decides whether your life will be happy or sad, it takes a highly aware mind and series of several micro & macro decisions throughout the day, weeks & months to determine the outcome. Eventually once we master the art, through a persistent ‘compound effect’ over the time that can become the outcome of most, if not all of our life. But it takes effort, and perseverance to achieve the state called Happiness!

Happiness is a journey and just like any other journey there are no free tickets! One has to invest the time, effort & and the right mindset to reap the rewards. Just like you pack your bags before going on a road trip, you do have to pack your bags with just the right things to embark on your journey to happiness. Positive attitude, a healthy sense of judgement, inner balance, sense of gratitude, macro thinking and perspective just to name a few. Often times, even after practicing awareness, there are situations which suck us right into a mental state where we feel jammed and trapped and ultimately lose our balance to land into muddy waters of hopelessness and distress. It happens when we do not take the time to pause and think between the stimuli (the very thing, event, person who is causing distress) and our response or rather reaction to it. When feeling attacked by an unpleasant situation, step away (mentally or physically) to allow yourself that gap, the time interval to intervene and interpret whether you should connect or disconnect with the situation at hand. Falling prey into instant reaction and not being able to resist the temptation to say something right away is often the reason behind our mental agony. Do not treat problems like stop signs, rather flashing yellows, where all you need to do is just to slow down, pause and decide the direction without losing your track! Over the time when you condition your mind to Pause Think & Act exercise you will find yourself in better control of situations. You cannot decide the situations that will approach you but you can always decide and control the way you want to react to them. As the popular saying goes, ‘you cannot decide the direction of winds, but you can adjust the sails to always reach your destination.’

The other thing, which took me many a years to realize, and which I firmly believe have a direct correlation to your happiness are the ‘Three Cs’. These Three Cs in life can weigh heavily on various aspects of your life and determine you overall satisfaction/fulfillment quotient. Those three Cs are –

Choice, Chance & Change!

Let me elaborate on each of them, because they are so critically important.

1    1. Choice - Every day, and multiple times in a day, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously, we make choices. Every choice we make leads to a decision. Every decision determines the outcome and direction of our life from the point the choice was made. If you are currently facing a life situation which is not quite pleasant, take a few steps back and connect the dots in your mind. You will find that somewhere down the road the responsibility for the situation lies in the choices you made, and the trail of decisions that followed from the choice. Now this is not to say that you are doomed for life to stay the way you are as a consequence of your choice. There is always a solution.  The first step to simplify things and to seek a solution is to acknowledge the ‘Responsibility’ of the choice you made. You cannot live in a defensive mode and spend years in trying to justify why you made those choices when the result is that you find yourself plain simple miserable because of them. Once you are over the first hurdle (which sometimes take years for some people) have taken the responsibility and acknowledged the problem, to determine the steps to fix it is the step two. That’s all there is to solve the trouble that seem so complicated on the surface. Seriously. 

Let’s take a simple example to bring the point home. Let’s say you are constantly unwell and not feeling your best energy level. As a result you are not able to reach your true potential. You feel demotivated to go to work, you get tired easily, you lose patience and start yelling on little things and by the end of the day you are completely exhausted to focus on anything meaningful. All in all your feel like your life is completely out of control.  Now connecting the dots, the reason for your being unwell roots somewhere in the choices you are making on daily basis, multiple times in day. Choices like, what time do you wake up in the morning? Do you want to leave yourself enough time to indulge in a physical activity (like a short walk, going to gym or doing yoga at home) or not? What do you eat during the day?  Is your eating choice providing you the healthy energy that your body needs? Do you take the time to relax your mind or mediate for a few minutes during the day? Do you read something positive even once in a week? Answering those simple questions and taking responsibility for the situation is the step 1 to the fix. Once you acknowledge what is wrong, you then determine the necessary steps to be taken to fix it. Like waking up a little early in the morning to make sure you have time to focus on yourself and your needs before you set out to win the world. To make sure ‘rush’ is not the very first thought that invades your mind when you wake up. Making healthy choices during the day to fuel your body with good energy that can last longer and keep you fit.  Taking a necessary pause during the day to step away, detach, relax and reenergize your mind. Reading some positive literature for a few minutes during the week. Starting you day on a positive note with a positive thought instead of scanning through people’s half cooked stories on Facebook. Make more choices that leads to happiness. Choose to do things that brings out the best in you. Once you invest the time and effort to see through these new choices you will see your problem will slowly start to fade away. The same principle can be applied to bigger, larger and seemingly complicated problems. It always starts with acknowledging and taking responsibility and ends with seeing through the execution of your new choices. Remember not to make a choice, in other words not to make a decision to change, is also a choice you make at the time.

2    2. Chance -  Many a times an opportunity surfaces itself at us, but whether or not we are willing to leave our comfort zone and take the chance to try something new is a crucial factor in deciding if we stay the same or we move to a different state. Often times people are afraid of taking chances and are not sure or do not have enough confidence in taking the chance. We all know that many a successful entrepreneurs who we admire today, had they not taken the chance and a leap of faith to follow the opportunity that they saw, there would not have been success stories! There would also not have been products like Computers, Laptops, Ipads and Smart Phones, TV and Movie Theatres, Cars and Airplanes, Cameras & Photographs, Home Appliances, not even a light bulb! Imagine our life without them. Scary, isn’t it. Taking a Chance into new opportunity is in fact your chance to change your life for better. Remember nothing changes until you take a chance! In the end we only regret the chances we didn’t take. And often by that time it’s too late to take one. 

    3. Change is another component which is critically important in deciding your happiness but is somehow in line with chance as far as the receptivity & common perception goes. More than usually, change is perceived with a negative connotation. Change means accepting something we are not used to. For example as discussed above, following a routine which will put us at discomfort of waking up early, or changing our eating habits, using a new software at work which will push us to learn new things, moving to a new town and making new adjustments, switching jobs and learning the ropes as a new comer, some people are even afraid of making new friends because of the anxiety of going through the dynamics of establishing a new relationship. Quite contrary to its ‘perception’ Change is in fact the most powerful stimulus in deciding the direction of our life. Those who have accepted change with open arms and devised a way to champion it are the one of the most astounding leaders this world has seen. Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekanand, Dalai Lama, Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, Galileo just to name a few of the many strong propellers of Change known worldwide.  Although It is not always easy but those who make the conscious decision to embrace the change are the ones most tactful in moving through the thick n thins of life, and probably that’s why the most successful. Let’s admit, Change is a natural phenomenon and is almost inevitable. We cannot escape it.  We all went through many a changes of evolutions as homo sapiens and even today we are challenged to change by our ever changing environs. If nothing ever changed there would be no progress, no forward momentum, nothing to look forward to and no butterflies eitherJ. Those who make the change are the certainly the ones headed into new arenas of new possibilities, new beginnings, new endings, those are the ones who set new records and enter a whole new platform of happiness. 

In a nut shell, we must make a Choice, to take a Chance or our life will never Change to get us the happiness that we all deserve! It’s not difficult, just take the small steps to begin your journey today!