Hospitals possess an uncanny ability to strip away life’s veneer, revealing truths we rarely acknowledge. As I sit in this sterile yet comfortable private room, watching my mother undergo a minor procedure, I’m struck by how the clinical brightness around me, illuminates more than just the medical charts and IV drips. It exposes the myths we construct in our minds around happiness.
The corridors teem with humanity in its rawest form: doctors striding with urgency, nurses administering medication and families clinging to hope, helplessness and sometimes both. Children struggle to breathe, limbs heal in casts, and pain becomes a shared language transcending all social boundaries. Yet amidst all this suffering, we continue chasing that elusive, shimmering mirage called happiness.
A recent social media exchange I had, brought this pursuit into sharp focus. After I posted about a 17-km run, a woman commented, asking whether my body still felt ‘youthful and spry.’ It felt like a casual swipe at my age, until her next message revealed more. She was a mother to a child with autism and had unknowingly split the world into two groups: the burdened, like herself, and the lucky ones, the so called ‘happy people.’
This binary thinking is a dangerous delusion. We scroll through carefully curated online lives and assume some people are simply blessed, untouched by struggle. We forget that behind every smiling photograph may lie unseen battles with illness, loneliness, loss, or anxiety. We begin to believe that happiness is a trait, not a choice.
But it is a choice. Always.
Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful captures this with haunting clarity. Even within the nightmare of a concentration camp, a father shields his son from the horrors around them, by reframing reality. The film asks a bold question: Can joy survive amid unimaginable darkness? And it demonstrates gently that happiness is not about circumstances, it’s about how we meet them.
My hospital stay reinforced this revelation. The facts are the same: my mother is ill. But I have two narratives available: gratitude for the medical care we can access, or despair at the situation. The difference lies in how I choose to see it.
The uncomfortable truth is that happiness isn’t something we have, it’s something we do. It’s not a rare gift bestowed upon the lucky. It’s a decision made in quiet moments, often when life feels hardest. Some days, that choice comes easily. On others, it requires everything we have. Perhaps, understanding this will offer us the relief we desperately seek.
Let us discard the false promise that all our suffering will magically cease someday. Instead, let us empower ourselves by recognising and accepting that our response to suffering will forever remain within our control. In hospital corridors and concentration camps alike, this choice endures. This is ultimately our power.
There are no happy people. There are only people choosing happiness, however briefly, however courageously, in whatever circumstances they find themselves. We have to try, imperfectly, determinedly to find light in the cracks.
Instagram: @preeti.shenoy