Happiness is NOW!

Several years ago, when my b-school prepared us for the job placement program, we were asked to come up with a tagline that describes our philosophy. The tagline would appear below our names and call out the philosophy we follow. As my classmates started to write very catchy and wonderful taglines for them, I was forced to find one for me. I had no clue how to create a tagline and I slept that night with a confused brain. Next morning, the placement representative appeared in front of me and asked me to write my tagline in the paper he showed. Without a tagline they would not print my profile in the placement brochure that ultimately decides my future. Two years of management classes, eight trimesters, forty plus subjects, sleepless nights of assignments, exams… nothing matters, but that moment decides the future – what a predicament! I grabbed the paper and wrote my tagline there: “Present moment is inevitable”. 

When I was attending my job interview from campus, one of the interviewer asked me the meaning of that tagline. I smiled at him and said, “Whatever I have done in the past or whatever I promise to do in the future are meaningless unless this moment you think it is worth hiring me – I will have to surpass this moment”. And they hired me!

When the days passed, I got to know the deeper meaning of the present moment. Wise people and great books told me the beauty of the present moment.

Imagine you are in rush hour and you are stuck in your city’s worst traffic jam. The delay means you are going to be late for a very important meeting. You have choices. Do you choose to worry yourself into a frenzy and arrive not only late but stressed? Or do you choose to accept the reality of the moment as it is, in all its inevitability? In which case, you could then relax and take whatever action you possibly can to improve the situation.

There is one thing that everybody is seeking for, and that is happiness. The real happiness is there in the present moment. The nature of the mind is that it leaves all the pleasant memories and it grabs onto those few unpleasant events and chews on it. If you are happy now, the past will not torment you and the future will take care of itself.  

German-born Eckhart Tolle, author of the bestseller, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, spent two years sitting on park benches “in a state of the most intense joy” after an epiphany. He emphasizes the importance of being aware of the present moment as a way of not being caught up in thoughts of the past and future. Just observe your mind when it is dwelling on the past: A mind stuck in the past is either regretful (“I wish it hadn’t happened like that”), angry (“It shouldn’t have been that way”) or trapped in glorifying the past (“It was so wonderful”).

A person without a job thinks, “When I get a job then I’ll be happy,” but a person with a job often thinks, “When I get a promotion, then I’ll be happy.” Someone who is single thinks, “I’ll be happy when I find my soul mate and get married,” but a married person may think they’ll be happy when they have children, but those with children often postpone their happiness to a time when their kids have flown the nest! Happiness in the future is an illusion.

 

Have you noticed how when you are doing something you love you become so totally immersed in the present moment? During these times, thoughts of the past or the future don’t come into your mind very much, and if they do they pass away more quickly. It is happiness for me when I play football with my four year old son in the park on Friday evenings. This is because I do not think of anything else at that moment and we play a 100% football!

Happiness can only be met when we embrace the present moment.

The joy of giving!

We all feel happy when we get something good. As kids, we all have grown up with the joy of getting, having and possessing. There is another type of joy that you get from giving. A mature joy that we get when we share, when we give, like the joy of grandmothers and grandfathers at home. When they share, they feel happy.

Last week my friend told me a story which he found in the web. The story goes like this:

A woman who was traveling alone in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, the woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his great fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the woman. “I’ve been thinking,” He said, “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.” The woman smiled, “The joy of giving!” 

The message within this story is so deep and pure. There are so many things we can all offer to those around us and believe it or not many of these things are free. If you feel like you don’t have any material possession to offer, give your time, your knowledge, your love and support to those are in need.

I cannot help but showing some interesting statistics: Say 80 years we live on this planet called Earth. Out of that, 40 years we spend sleeping, 10 years we spend in the bathroom, 10 years in eating and 15 years in working. We need to wake up and see how much time we are actually “awake”. What do we do all these time? Everyday billions of thoughts come into our brains and then they go. We hold on to some thoughts (If you hold on to all the thoughts you will be in the mental hospital for sure!).  

Holding on to your own thoughts and things will surely make you sick. The nature of joy is to share. When you are happy, enthusiastic, and energetic, you want to share. If you are happy you can’t say, 'I am happy, leave me alone'! Like wise men said, “all the gifts you carry with you are for others”. Giving makes your wake moments so meaningful. Giving makes you feel happy from within. Give a meal to someone who cannot afford one, tell a story to a small kid – their smiles will bring a lasting smile on your face. 

Crystal moment or Rubber moment?

I was never appreciative about the yellow post-it notes pasted all over the study room by my wife! It looked yucky to me. “Such a waste of time” – I comment loudly looking at them, especially seeing her “bucket lists”.  At times she takes a futile attempt to convince me saying all these really work as it gets recorded in your subconscious mind and through the magic of law of attraction (referring to the great video “The Secret”).

Last weekend I accidently found a new post-it note scribbled with only two phrases – “crystal moment and rubber moment”. I was very curious to know and I couldn’t keep myself from asking her what does that mean. She told that she had a training on some technical skills and during the training the trainer just mentioned about it – that was the only take-home for her from that meeting.  

Any moment in our life can be accepted in either of the two ways – a crystal moment or a rubber moment.  “You can bounce back from missing a rubber moment, like a soccer game”, she said. “But the clear implication is that missing a crystal moment—a graduation or the birth of a child—will create lasting damage”. What a wonderful concept! When there is a conflict of two events, how many times we ask ourselves which one is a rubber moment and which one a crystal moment?

Researching on this idea, I found many hits in google. Time Magazine has published an online piece about work-life balance for CEO dads. In it, Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, describes what he calls “rubber” and “crystal” moments (read).

Smith says, “The rubber moments are routine – your son’s 37^th basketball game of the season or your daughter’s 15th dance competition. Events you’d like to see, but can’t always make. But you know there is another one coming up. So if you miss one, you can promise to make another. But then there are those crystal moments – those once-in-a-lifetime events that make for precious memories. The first homecoming dance. Your sister’s wedding. The must-do things that you’ll remember forever and should never miss”.

Smith’s metaphor mirrors the glass ball story that Rebecca Ryan talks about in her first book (read). For Rebecca, work is the rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other big moments in life are glass. Drop them and they break. It’s a lesson Rebecca says she learned from her father’s hospice nurse.

I do remember this now when I need to make a choice between my office laptop and my three-year old son’s offer to play with him for ten minutes!

Today I glued my first post-it note on my bedroom wall and I felt good... J

When things look bad

How do we think positively when things look bad? “When the going gets tough let the tough gets going”. Yes, that is where the positive thinking really comes through. So when things look bad, here are a few suggestions for bringing positive thinking creatively into the situation.

Look for the Advantage: Realize the great truth that to every disadvantage there may be, and usually is, a corresponding advantage. Consider the old truism that behind the darkest clouds, the sun is shining. In the toughest situations, there is always some value that is inherently good. What you deeply think has a strong tendency to produce itself in fact. So always think positively, believingly, expectantly, hopefully.

Turn Impossible into Certainties: The important emphasis when things are not going well isn’t what is happening but your attitude towards what is happening. A friend sent me an sms one day which read: “Attitudes are more important than facts”. At first I doubted the truth of that statement, but it proved itself so many times that I owe much to it as an insight.

Look Up Not Down: I have seen some of my friends who are so much discouraged often say “I have hit bottom and there is no hope”. I have to reply them this: “Congratulations, having hit bottom, you can go no lower; the only direction is up”. Your mind is like an elevator. Always press a positive thought button and move up to a higher floor.

What makes you Happy?

How would you like to see yourself – happy and bubbling with enthusiasm or dull and difficult to please?

Sometimes you like to be pleased, appeased and cajoled, so you put on a tough, troubled face and act difficult to please. People who keep long faces and expect others to cajole and appease them, drives others away. Lovers often do this. A boyfriend/girlfriend expends lot of energy cajoling counterpart, reducing the joy and celebration of the moment.

It is okay to occasionally show how upset you are, but doing it repeatedly is taxing for you and the people you love. If you feel down, appease and please yourself- do not expect others to do it. Your need to be appeased by someone else is a sign of grossness. If you want attention, all you get is tension!!

It sounds a bit philosophical, but it’s true- the inability to experience joy and sorrow is inertia. Experiencing joy and sorrow is a trait of consciousness. Being happy in one’s own joy and sad in one’s own sorrow is a trait of animals. Being happy at another’s joy and saddened by another’s sorrow is a trait of humans. If you are saddened by another’s sorrow, sorrow will never come to you. If you are happy at another’s joy, then joy will never leave you.

Children are more expert in happiness than adults. The adult who can carry the spirit of a child into middle and old age is a genius. Whenever I meet a child I ask him/her a question- what makes you happy? The simplicity of their answers always amazed me. Their answers were rather touching. Here is a little girl’s list: a flock of sparrows in the evening sky, early morning droplets at the tip of grasses, smoke rising from a chimney, moon in the clouds… beautiful right? To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes to see romance in the common place, a child’s heart and spiritual simplicity.

Many of us manufacture our own unhappiness. Of course not all unhappiness is self created, for social conditions are responsible for not a few of our woes. Yet, it is a fact that to a large extent by our thoughts and attitude we distil out of the ingredients of our life of either happiness or unhappiness for ourselves. A study reveals that four people out of five are not so happy as they can be. Since a fundamental desire of every human being is for that state of existence called happiness, something should be done about it. Happiness is achievable and the process for obtaining it is not complicated.

A very large proportion of the unhappiness of the average individual is self manufactured. It is further distilled by saturating the mind with feelings of resentment, ill-will, and hate. There is a wise saying, “… he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast..”. In other words, cultivate a merry heart, that is, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast, which is to say you can enjoy life every day. Out of the happiness habit comes a happy life.

The happiness habit is developed by simply practicing happy thinking. Make a mental list of happy thoughts and pass them through your mind several times every day. If an unhappiness thought should enter your mind, immediately stop, consciously eject it, and substitute a happiness thought. Every morning before arising, lie relaxed in bed and deliberately drop happy thoughts into your conscious mind. Visualize the day the way you want it to be. While dressing, or getting breakfast, say aloud a few such remarks as following: “I believe this is going to be a wonderful day. I believe I can successfully handle all the problems that will arise today. I feel good physically, mentally and emotionally. I am grateful for all that I have had, for all that I now have, and for all that I shall have…..” This is a very simple technique. Trust this fully and practice it by giving you heart. Believe my words; you will be astounded to see the way your life turning around!!

Become one whose enthusiasm never dies, come what may..!!

What’s your Problem?

I am so happy to start my posts with a wonderful topic- Problem!!

When I searched in Wikipedia there I found a definition: A problem is an issue or obstacle which makes it difficult to achieve a desired goal, objective or purpose. It refers to a situation, condition, or issue that is yet unresolved. In a broad sense, a problem exists when an individual becomes aware of a significant difference between what actually is and what is desired. Believe me, a problem is not as complex as this definition looks!

There was an incident narrated by the Positive thinking Guru, Norman Vincent Peale. One day Mr. Peale met a young man on the street who actually told Peale he would give a substantial amount of money to Peale’s church if Peale would get him rid of all his problems. Peale confirmed once if he wanted to get rid of ‘all’ the problems. He said, yes. Peale agreed that he would be able to help this man and informed him about a place there were 100,000 people and not one had a problem. The man insisted Peale to take him over there. Peale told him that he would not like it, as this was a big cemetery!

It is a fact that no one in a cemetery has a problem! Thus, logically Problem is a sign of Life. A person can hardly become strong without being subjected to hardships. If you cultivate this thinking, your creativity will be enhanced.

When there is a problem, you either deny it saying there is no problem, or you sit down to solve the problem and make it a big issue. Neither of these help. A problem does not disappear when you deny it and it does not get solved when you sit down to solve it. The effective ways to face the problems are: 1. Admit it exists, 2. See it as a small problem, and do not say it is big, 3. If it concerns people, keep in touch with them instead of avoiding them, 4. Talk less and give time a chance, and 5. Get together and celebrate. When you celebrate and put the problem on the back burner, you will see that the problem gets solved in time.

We know, many of the meetings to solve problems end up in disaster. If you do not have any problems, you will create problems or you will become a problem yourself! It is better to have a problem than to be a problem.

Like wise men said, do not solve all your problems. Keep at least one of them. You need something to munch on- and life goes on….