The pursuit of happiness

 

Yesterday night, I saw Gabriele Muccino’s “The pursuit of happiness”, starring Will Smith and his son. This movie is inspired by a real life story of a man struggling to build his future and looking for happiness.

 

Apart from being an inspiring story, it also made me think about happiness and its definition. The Oxford dictionary defines happiness as the quality or state of being happy. But how do we know we are happy? I have thousands of issues in my life and at times feel let down by external forces.

 

And yesterday night, when i was thinking about it, i realized that though I’ve had my share of rough patches, God has generally been kind to me. Its just that we don’t realize the small little things that happen in our life and make it better then what it would have been without them.

 

In fact when i looked back at last couple of months, i realized that there have been few instances which have made life better for me every time i felt that the chips were down.

 

The other day, something happened and i was really sad. I was feeling terrible when suddenly Sampu called me up (though we are best friends, we hardly talk or meet on weekdays). We spoke for around 5 minutes when we decided to take Chopi on conference call.

 

Now, Chopi, Sampu and me have had some wild time together. We have shared each and everything about each other. Both of them are married now and Chopi is settled in Delhi. Last time when she came down, we had a great time and were partying till early morning (though we couldn’t talk much).

 

So, we took Chopi on Con Call and for next 2 hours, all three of us were just screaming and laughing. And when i kept the phone, i had forgotten everything that was making my life miserable early in the evening.

 

And this was just one of many such instances in the last couple of months when suddenly something has happened to change my mood and lift my spirits.

 

For eg. I had a friend who is an Air Hostess. We had almost lost touch. But suddenly, she’s started calling me almost everyday and even her flight schedules have changed. She does a lot of Mumbai bound flights and hence we meet more often now. And she is good fun to be with – the kind with whom you can forget everything and be yourself.

 

And then there is this really sweet woman who’s always in high spirits and has this uncanny knack of making me smile everytime I’m feeling low. She’s been a great company in the last couple of months – not to mention the new meaning she’s given to “long drives” in Mumbai traffic 😉

 

And then i always have great friends like Ships and Nags whom I can call anytime and i know I’ll keep the phone smiling.

 

What I’m trying to say is – We all get our share of happiness in some form or other. Its just that we don’t realize that and remember the bad times. Infact, we take such good things in life for granted. We treat them as part of our daily life and treat the “not so good times” as an impostor. What we need to realize is that these are part of our everyday life and for every low, there is a high and vice versa.

 

And I’ve realized that I’m much more happy these days. At times i do think about people who are not part of my life anymore. But for every such person, I’ve someone else who’s become an integral part of my life now. At times I really miss talking to few people (specially before hitting the bed). But then again, I’ve new people to call at midnight and talk till dawn.

 

Life is not as complicated as we make it. Its just that we need to appreciate the small little good things in our lives. Happiness is around us. We just need to stop wasting our time thinking about the bad things that happened to us. Happiness is my right and nobody can take that away from me.