What is happiness?

(by NANDINI SHARMA)

Happiness😍
Alphabetically, Happiness might be just 9 letters, however, when I close my eyes and think about the emotion that the word carries, infinite emotions circulate through my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual body.

It’s not just regular, whimsical instances that I can recall, that has filled me with a sense of happiness, but, I also found happiness in the most unimaginable places, people and in things.

To my virtual understanding, happiness has that of capricious nature. It is super subjective. As we move from cultures, continents, races, genders,  everyone has their own understanding and meaning of happiness.

To paraphrase,  something that perhaps might make people of specific thinking or perception happy, might not necessarily have the same effect on people having a different school of thought.

However, my understanding of happiness is more inclined towards the world inside you.

Life as we know it, is not always sunshine🌄 and rainbows🌈. More often than not, it is also grey skies and storms. But, to find the silver lining amidst the dark clouds is what hope and optimism are about😍👍.

Knowing that, that even though life may go haywire at times; things may seem out of hand or the load of uncertainty may unleash upon you, hope and optimism are the key elements to enforce your determination to keep going forward.

Hope and optimism are two of the many factors that pave a path way for happiness.

Contrary to popular belief, I very strongly feel that, Happiness outside doesn’t result in happiness inside. Instead, its the other way round.

“The workings of your inside world greatly determine the world you see on the outside”

👆This quote isn’t copied from the internet. It is something that I’ve come to realise with the way I’ve known my life to be. After having a bunch of rather awakening experiences at the age of just twenty years , this quote seemed to strengthen its roots inside me. It spoke volumes to me. Until, I finally could translate my feelings into words.

As a child👧, I was very fascinated by lavish lifestyles, beautiful and huge dollhouses. My happiness was directly proportionate to the number of times my family and I would go out to eat at good places. But that wasn’t all. Somewhere I was always looking for a deeper meaning. Since, as a child, I could not express my feelings or rather, I did not have words to, I would settle for materialistic things.

Colouring🎨, painting, looking at plants🌿, new stationery, the smell of new colour pencils; rather odd I would say but quite soothing to my then childhood senses, gave me immense happiness as well.

But, things changed as I grew up. Both inside and outside.  Due to the incidences that happened with and around me , and the experiences that I acquired, I saw myself  walking a path where the urge to find the real and deeper meaning of happiness kept reiterating.

I finally decided to listen to myself and delved deeper inside myself to question and challenge my understanding and meaning of happiness. A meaning that had no connections to be traced back into what society told or defined the meaning of happiness to be.

Safe to say, I have the very renowned Swiss Psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, backing me up on my ideology of happiness. He said, “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

Our world functions on the concept of duality. As stars cannot shine🌠 without darkness, there can be no true happiness in one’s life without having wandered in the lanes of sadness. Happiness would just be a normal virtue that one would get really used to, so much so, to the extent where it would almost seem boring to be happy.

That’s exactly where the lows come into power. They make us appreciate the happy times. Without the lows, we would never be anticipative of the highs.

Carl Jung took the conventional meaning of Eudaemonia(literally translated as; the state of being happy, blessed and prosperous) another way. He said, ” We should all foster it(happiness) inside of us.”

In our world, it is the complete opposite.
People now rely on external sources of gratification. It has now reached to an extent where everyone feels obligated to be happy.
If not that, they would like the world to believe that they are.
It is only doing one thing, that is, the complete opposite; more harm than help. The more you run after something, the more it runs away from you. Same goes with happiness.

Looking for it outside everywhere without even giving weightage to the thought that— Happiness is a virtue contained in you abundantly, for you are its eternal source.

Read 3 Simple Techniques to Create Inner Happiness. by ADITI to know that how by adopting few simple techniques you too can easily achieve INNER HAPPINESS😍👍

MANY BLESSINGS.

Be LOVE