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Happiness can be defined as freedom from unhappiness, continued sadness, remorse or regret. It also means freedom from fear and anxiety, as no happiness can subsist in the company of anxiety or fear. It is a quiet joy that radiates from our soul, abides and energises our hearts, and expresses itself through every limb of our body. Now, happiness is distinctly something different from delight and pleasure that are kinds of excitement, and occur as and when an impulse is gratified. Excitement is by its very nature a fleeting or terminal emotion that runs its life span of a few minutes or hours before it disappears. And it is also true that sometimes, excitement does elevate the mood and mind into the spheres of happiness, yet delectable excitement itself is not synonymous with happiness. Distinguishably, happiness is more of a state of mind or soul. It is not like the daily weather forecast or a passing season, it is rather the general climate, the informing ambience in which a human soul ‘lives, moves about and has its being’.
"Happiness is our
spiritual
response to
the emotional
turbulence caused by
the events
that affect us."
Similarly, the origins of happiness are also quite different from those of excited pleasure or delight. Excitement depends usually on an external stimulus. Gratification of the instinctive, intellectual or sensuous needs leads to pleasure and delight such as listening to good music, eating delicious food, enjoying the company of elegant people, sipping in the beauty of nature or art or reading a treatise on Mathematics or the Theory of Relativity. These things do please our mind or body that take delight in these acts of pleasure. Hence, pleasure is our body’s response to the external stimulus of (pleasing or pleasurable) gratification of an impulse and delight is our body’s response to the stimulus of pleasure. If someone’s company pleases me, I’m usually ‘delighted’ to see him or her. While, on the other hand, happiness is a response not dictated by external stimuli; it is rather the attitude, the position or the choice of an individual soul when faced with the totality of pain and pleasure in life.
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Life brings us new stimuli on a daily basis: the success or failure, the profit or loss, the glory or humiliation, the loss of a dear friend or a child or a parent; the new found love; a new job or a sack. All these excitements are like little tempests that rock the boat of our emotional life. Some of these excitements leave us pleased and make us feel happy, while others make us feel sad and unhappy. And happiness is our spiritual response to the emotional turbulence caused by the events that affect us.
Happiness, therefore, is our ability to rise above the vicissitudes of life’s emotional upheavals. It is our ability to see beyond the immediate and present pain or suffering.
It is our ability to transcend and transmute the day to day emotional turbulence into serenity. Happiness is our choice of not leaving our mind and soul at the mercy of the sways of excitement. Happiness cannot eliminate sorrow, suffering, pain or death from the scheme of things, but it can help keep depression, fear and anxiety, perennial sadness, hopelessness, pessimism and other fathers of unhappiness at bay.
"We can
create happiness
only if we do not link it to
the outcomes
of our actions."
As happiness consists in ‘freedom’ from certain other states of mind, it involves a struggle to steer clear of them and can be developed into a habit through repeated action. While on the other hand, if we allow our soul to descend into dumps each time we encounter pain or suffering, we would develop the habit of unhappiness through repeated action. Therefore, we can create happiness by maintaining a certain safe distance from the negative effects of pain and suffering. We can create happiness only if we do not link it to the outcomes of our actions. Most of the time, the outcomes of our actions are not as expected: we do not always achieve what we aim at, we do not always get what we want, and we do not always reach what we set out for. Simply, we cannot control consequences; we cannot dictate results; we cannot enslave the objective reality to suit our whims. Therefore, it is fatal to link happiness to any form of desired results. Happiness must be a self-sustaining, self-nurturing and self-renewing spiritual resource that is not a hostage to the highs and lows of fortune. It is our ability to relish the salt and spice, the bitter and sweet of life alike. For comments write to yourshahzada@gmail.com |