Post-mortem

Life goes by so quickly. It seems 2007 had just started and it’s March already. The other day I went through a quiz on happiness. The analysis of one question implied that when you concentrate a lot on what you are doing and the passage of times goes by unnoticed, you are a happy person.

This got me thinking. What is happiness? Do we truly experience it in our lifetime? A friend once said that happiness is nothing but a count of the moments of joy that we experience. These moments, albiet small in their duration, get stuck in our memory as a string of events. When we recall these moments, and we always recall them in groups, we experience happiness. Otherwise, we just lead a normal existence in a sort of neutral state of mind.

The oxford dictionary defines the word ’happy’ as, feeling or showing of pleasure. I feel pleasure when I see little birds come and feed on the pieces of bread crumbs that I spread out for them. We come across many little things that fill up our everyday with pleasure. It may be the smile of a little child we see on the street, or a pretty butterfly or, like in my case, birds. And then there are other things, bigger things/events, that make us feel happy. Weddings, a new job, the arrival of a baby; but again, all these things are momentary sources of joy. The joy experienced from these events has its own life cycle; it builds up slowly but ends very abruptly and resurfaes now and then.

These days, more than ever, we have started seeking happiness. We look for it and when we can’t find it easily, we try and create it. It seems as if we are scared of grief. Grief is as much a part of our life as happiness. In fact, we can’t appreciate joy if we don’t experience grief. Only when the clouds of gloom darken our horizon do we realize the worth of the sunshine that lit up our every single day. Once we understand the importance of the sun we want to have it back as soon as possible.

Why do we run away from grief and sadness? Why can’t we experience it like we do joy and ecstacy? Are we afraid that accepting grief would make us social pariahs? But no matter how we behave, once people are aware of our grief they keep referring to it over and over again. And then there remains no escape but to create happiness. So we lock away our pain somewhere inside us and pretend that we’ve lost the key while it remains there, in front of us, all the time.

I don’t know why I am writing this today. Maybe I felt tempted by the bunch of keys that lay in front of me.

Where are the birds?!