What stands between you and your happiness?
When those three slum kids stopped playing stapu abruptly and began to cross the road, I knew they had serendipitously found a coin and were coming to purchase the ice cream for themselves.
The little girl wore an oversized tattered frock kept in place at her back with two safety pins; the boy in blue knickers, on her left, held her hand tightly as they crossed the road; and their elder brother, the bare-chested boy in khaki trousers, walked ahead of them with the coin in his hand.
There was pride in the elder brother’s eyes as he tossed the coin in front of the ice cream seller. The seller took the coin from his hand, told him that it could fetch him only one ice cream—of the cheapest variety—and handed him that. Even though it was a stick with only coloured ice at its end, nevertheless, it was a proud moment for all three of them.
Waiting at a bus stop, only a few feet away from them, I was wondering who among the three would eat it—while leaving the other two deprived.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the joy in their eyes as they took turns to have a bite on the only stick they had managed to buy. Their joy was so unapologetically bold and contagiously powerful that I felt it with deep appreciation at the core of my heart. Had I not chosen to be a part of their joy, from a distance, perhaps, the only other emotion I could have felt was that of envy.
Just then, two Mercedes cars, raising a cloud of dust, came to a screeching halt near the ice cream vendor where these kids were enjoying their ice cream. A big fat man, dressed in a spotless white kurta-pyjama with gold buttons, alighted from the first car.
As he limped forward a few steps and spread his hands around the ice cream box, he declared, “This box is mine. From this moment onwards, entertain no other customers till we are here.”
Following this man, languidly, were four children between the ages 11 to 20 and three middle-aged ladies. All of them were so obese that it appeared as if, they had been poured into their clothes to their full capacity. The little boy’s knickers were so precariously tight that it needed just a blade to be shown from a distance to rip it apart. They all ordered their own favourite ice creams—cassatas, butterscotch and choco treats. While resentfully comparing the experience with the better ones that they had had in the past, the ladies were eating them as if they were doing someone a favour by doing so. The children complained how the brand did not match their standards but kept on eating more and more. Then, they began to debate where else they could have gone for a better experience.
Instead of happiness or smiles, there was a frown on their faces.
I realised that day that we need to focus on, appreciate and feel happiness in order to be happy. It is not the amount of money that we invest in purchasing any comforts but the intensity of mental presence, appreciation and gratitude with which we experience these comforts that decides how much happiness these would bring to us, in any given moment. Just as we cannot feel someone’s body temperature with gloves on, we cannot feel happiness so long as our gloves of inattention, comparison and ingratitude are on. Money may give us the freedom to buy what we want, but it cannot teach us how to focus on and feel the happiness we supposedly buy with it. Happiness is, quite simply, receiving, attending to and focusing on what life brings to us in any given moment with appreciation and gratitude—as if it is prasadam.
Happiness can be called pleasure, joy or bliss depending on whether its source is sensory, psychological or spiritual. When the slum kids discovered the coin serendipitously and thought of buying an ice cream with it, they experienced joy in those moments; when they tasted it, they experienced its pleasure; and when they shared it lovingly among themselves and paid focused attention to its taste with appreciation and gratitude—to the extent of becoming one with it—they experienced bliss.
Whether it is pleasure, joy or bliss, any kind of happiness is possible only when we enliven the circuit connecting the experiencer, the experienced and the experience with the current of attention and appreciation.
Let us check and remove our gloves of inattention, comparison and ingratitude, now and in each moment that follows.
(The author is a corporate trainer, keynote speaker and the writer of Reerve Your Thoughts, Reserve Your Disease and other books. Email: thrive.ab@gmail.com)