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The Art Of Happiness Adding Life To The Years
By: R.S. Mooshahary

Last fortnight I wrote on the conquest of suffering. Today happiness is following on the heels of sorrow like the sunlight following darkness to warm up and illuminate the cold alcove of dreariness in our hearts to make life a journey of joy. Happiness is within all of us but in the dust and ashes of our sublunary life, we look for it without, and we fail to find it.

Together with life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness is an innate human desire. The researchers have claimed that happiness is partly determined by personality traits and that both personality and happiness are largely hereditary. They say that people who do not excessively worry, and who are sociable and conscientious tend to be happier. Their findings suggest that people with the right inherited personality mix have an 'affective reserve' of happiness, which can come handy in stressful times. They however found that despite happiness having its roots in our genes, around 50% of the differences in happiness quotient between people are still attributable to external factors such as relationship, health and career.

Animals are happy so long as they have enough to eat and are in good health. For men also food, shelter, clothing and health are essential for happiness and without them, it is futile to talk of happiness. Nevertheless mere availability of all that do not necessarily make a man happy. Each one of us is a walking universe. We perceive and that means that we add meaning to every signal coming our way and not merely record an event as a literal image like a camera. Anything that we perceive and see is colored by our own set of unique experiences. If you are looking at the full moon on a pleasant night and you feel depressed, your mood seeps in to full moon making it look sad and lonely. The same full moon will exhilarate you in your joyous mood. The world is a mirror of our perception.

What makes the perception a tangible experience is our intelligence: for - mirabile dictu -different levels of intelligence create different realities. If I like to eat fish and you detest it the difference is not in the fish; not even in our taste buds. The characteristics of the fish molecules and the taste receptors in our mouth for both of us are the same. Yet in the process of eating fish, I derive delight and you disgust. All the raw data of experience that pass through us are filtered by our intelligence and no two people apprize it in exactly the same way. That makes one man's pleasure another man's pain.

There is a streak of Byronic unhappiness in most of us: "There is not a joy the world can give like that it takes away / when the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay." We often feel that life is essentially wretched, since the man who has all he wants is still unhappy and he sees 'a mark in every face he meets, marks of weakness, marks of woe.' He forgets that the indispensable part of happiness is to accept that we have to learn to be happy without some of the things we want, learn to live with adversities. Happiness is not a conditional matter - 'I will be happy when I get what I want,' 'I cannot be happy with you, you are not up to my standard' - such attitudes make none happy. Unhappy is one who may be tossing on the bed at 2 am thinking about the lengthy philippic with his rival (see local TV channels), whose obsessions are greed, jealousy and hatred or who is unduly worried over the tryst with tomorrow.

The key to happiness is that life has to be satisfying in the present. It is not easy to define 'the present,' however. From one perspective, it is the minutest measure of time - the fleeting instant - that facilitates the future to flip-flop in to the past. From the opposite perspective, the present is eternal, because it is ever renewing, ever different. Time indeed is 'a three-fold present' - the past in the present memory, the future in the present anticipation. It is yesterday's hurt that we are defending against today, last year's glory that we want to relive, a passionate love we so want to endure, and the future we seek to shape - all in the present perception.

Irrespective of how gratifying one aspect of life becomes in the present, its satisfaction is limited. It wears itself out unless one finds a way to remain connected to the source of renewal. Renewal is one of life's primary urges, like love, hunger and freedom, but more importantly, life itself needs renewing to keep ahead of the tireless process of destruction. We are constantly dying and being born at the physical level; each minute millions of our cells divide withering away in a death that gives birth to two new cells. The impulse of renewal energizes the dynamics of life even while the past is pulling us from behind and the future is enticing to rush ahead.

The rhythm of renewal establishes equilibrium in the present by joining the heart and mind, which yoga actually means. In such a state feelings would come from the heart with the mind approving and delighting in them. This is a sure sign that the mind is not running ahead of the heart in anticipation or lagging behind in nostalgia. The Chinese poet Wu-Men says: " Ten thousand flowers in spring, / The moon in autumn, / A cool breeze in summer, / Snow in winter, / If your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things, / This the best season in life."

. There is more to mind than thinking. It makes the eyes see what it wants. It is infinitely active, unimaginably infinite but remains clouded with things we have no control. We fight our fiercest battles within our mind, which render us tense and troubled. By shifting the focus, the same mind can tune us to the ecstasy of life and love. At times it is our biggest tormentor; at others deepest fount of blissful fantasy. Subduing a million mutinies in the mind and liberating it from the incarceration of illusion are essential to warm our hearts in the fire of life.

"I think, therefore, I am." We are what we think; if you are happy, you have happy thoughts most of the time; if you are depressed, you have sad thoughts most of the time. Thinking is an attitude and it has the power to change our feelings; make us do things differently. In a real sense, a new thought turns us to new persons. 'Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts,' is not a situation of remorse but a romance of thought actualization, of discovering the mine of happiness within.

The writer, a former Director General of Police in Kerala and Director General of the National Security Guard and the Border Security Force, is currently the State Chief Information Commissioner, Assam)