Pursuit of happiness?

Happiness, is often touted as the holy grail of our existence, the undeniable raison d’être of almost all of our endeavors, the eternally elusive obsession of most sentient creatures.

Or is it?

While it is true that except for momentary fleeting flirtations, happiness seems to perpetually evade us, but perhaps, the stinging irony is not that happiness is frustratingly slippery-but that though we are perpetually trying to catch hold of it, we are most of the time inanely unaware of the pursuit!

What else can justify the splendidly incongruous, if not irreconcilable, way we go about our life and activities, with our desire to be happy?

Surely it sounds like a cliché, but still I think it won’t be too much of a wastage of our time to ponder upon these ‘banalities’ for a few moments, because in spite of being trite, they certainly ring a bell.  

We spend our youth in earning money, and then the money to regain the lost youth!

We invented technology to make our life easy and simple, but have ended up making it irredeemably hard and complex!

We have gadgets that have broken down all barriers and constraints of time and space and connected us to each other like never before, but we have today more broken families than ever before!

And we can go on listing even more instances of our collective imbecile short-sightedness, but I think the point has been made. Somehow we manage, almost every time to come up with something truly extra-ordinary, and then in an exceedingly ludicrous way, defeat the very purpose of it!  As if on a journey, unwittingly we get totally confused of the destination midway!

I do not know if we have more depressed people today than any time in the history of mankind, but how many of us can honestly claim, in spite of our relative material well being, to be content and satisfied, if not happy and blissful?

Or perhaps, even before that, do we have any coherent idea, what is it that really makes us happy? Yes, perhaps we have some notions- a job or a pay-hike, vacation, relationships, shopping, eating out, new toys (electronic gadgets or cars), perhaps a new house-but have we not acquired some of them if not all, at some point in the past? It sure did give us a high, but how lasting was it? How long did it take us to actually get over with it, and our insatiable mind was at it again getting caught up in the desire of acquiring the next cool thing?

I think it is not the problem that we acquired or did not acquire something. The problem is that even when we did acquire something, we somehow totally forgot that the point was not that thing per se,  but happiness. I think caught up, as we are in our scheme of things, in the way we have ordered our lives, in the way we have conditioned our minds- we hardly ask ourselves this inconvenient question- Now am I happy?

We are perhaps too caught up in satisfying our ego, than following our heart. When we are really happy, it’s not our ego that soars with joy, but it’s our heart that experiences the nectar of bliss.  And it is here perhaps, that most of us give a slip.

Are we really pursuing happiness? 


Perhaps the answer lies in our awareness of the question in the things we do, in the things we desire, and in the things we end up acquiring.