Tag: Happiness

THRIVING IN TIMES OF COVID19 – 4

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Got an extended weekend due to Friday being May Day. Woke up early on both Friday and Saturday (just 6.30 AM, pretty early by my standards for a weekend) to order groceries and vegetables on Food Delivery Apps. I was not successful in ordering on Friday but was able to order on Saturday. Somehow I have not been sleeping at the usual hour and I have been staying awake till 2 AM on both Friday  & Saturday morning. So the combined effect was that, during the first part of the day I was feeling extremely sleepy and moving around my house like a Zombie.

For about an hour on Friday evening and about an hour on Saturday evening, I played cricket with my daughter & son. I also played cricket with my son for about an hour at around Noon on Saturday as well. We used my son’s plastic cricket bat and a bunch of plastic balls. I was the bowler to both of them as they took turns as batters. It was fun play time for the three of us. 

One of the things that I have realized is that the only Truest Measure of Love is Time and not money. And you get to see that and feel that when you have very young kids. I have heard Conor Neill ask in one of his YouTube videos, ‘How does a child spell love?’ And went on to spell the answer as: ‘T-I-M-E.’ I got to experience this fact so dramatically a couple of days ago. On that day, I was going for my evening walk  trying to catch up on my step count for the day (more on this in a later post). As I was going from one room to another, my son was frequently crisscrossing my path and making it difficult for me to walk fast. So I told him, “Let’s go for a walk,” and held his hand. At this very moment I saw his face lit up with a smile that was better than the sight of a million flowers blooming at the same time. As we were walking from one room to another and taking left or right turns, he was visibly excited and was laughing out loud. During that indoor walk session, I  realized that parents spending time with kids means a lot for them, even if that time is spent on simple activities. In fact every activity and every moment that parents spend with kids is absolutely special for them.

On Friday night, post dinner as I was sitting with my son in our room not knowing how to keep him engaged, I made paper boat and paper gliders for him. As I finished making the glider my daughter walked into our room. She too wanted to make paper boat. I gave her a sheet of paper from one of her old homework notebooks. As she was making the paper boat I thought this could be a good way to pass time. So I went to YouTube and typed ‘simple Origami for kids.’ I got a string of results from which I chose the video about making a paper shirt. We did not have colorful Origami papers so we decided to use papers from my daughter’s old homework notes. After finishing the paper shirt, my daughter chose the video about how to make princess dress. The instructions in both the videos were easy to follow and we ended up with final products that looked like something shown in the videos. It’s a big surprise to me that even I was able to get it right!!! 

On Saturday night, we decided to do a couple of Origami stuff once again. My daughter chose both the videos. The first one was on how to make sun glasses which was very easy. The second one was on how to make sword. This one was more complex than the other three stuff that we did. We kept missing the folds here and there and had to watch sections of the video multiple times to get the sword design right. But finally we managed to get both the swords right. Overall the time and effort was well spent. Not only did my daughter like it, even I found the time spent on doing the simple paper craft very refreshing. 

Just before the lock-down I had gone to Odyssey to buy some craft-work DIY kits for my daughter. I had picked up an Origami kit in my hand initially, but decided to a buy the Quilling Jewellery kit and Amar Chitra Katha Mahabaratha book-set for her. The Origami kit would have come in very handy yesterday and the day before it. But it’s OK as long as we get any paper. For sometime now, my daughter has been pleading  to open the Quilling kit and make the rings. But, I have asked my daughter to make the rings the week before her school reopens so that she can gift those rings to her school friends. Instead she has been keeping herself busy reading or drawing. 

Checked on Amazon for Origami kits but they are still delivering only essential stuff. Till we are able to get Origami kits from some shop or Amazon, guess we will have to use papers from daughter’s old homework notes.

My First Published Work

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                      Book Cover_1

 

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In September 2015 I contributed a ‘free verse’ poem titled ‘Life is a Wasteland’ for Poetry and stories anthology contest run by ‘Poetry Paradigm’ in association with ArtsForward Ideas & Events and Microsoft ‘Create to Inspire Fellowship.’ The book titled ‘The Dawn Beyond Waste’ was launched on February 9, 2016. I received the contributors copy by mail yesterday. It was absolutely exhilarating to see my first published work.

ABCs of the pursuit of everlasting Happiness

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The Pursuit of Everlasting Happiness is like…..

Ascent of an imaginary summit

Bathing with nothing but air

Carving a sculpture without tools

Dive in to a bottomless ocean

Eating with a hungry ghost

Flight to an unreachable horizon

Gathering sand grains on the seashore

Hoping onto an endless rollercoaster

Influencing a million people with silence

Journey through emotional cliffs and valleys

Knitting the world with a stream of words

Lecturing a bunch of puppies

Measuring a shape shifting monster

Never ending marathon

Oscillating between darkness and light

Pursuit of an oasis of quicksand

Quarrelling with oneself

Racing back in time

Star gazing on a cloudy night

Taming a wild beast

Unleashing nothing

Valuing the invaluable

Wedding with a quirky stranger

X-ray of skeleton less body

Yawning while underwater

Zooming into a black hole

Happiness

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Happiness is an eternal quest. Happiness is a mirage. Happiness is like passing clouds. There are two kinds of happiness: Happiness that we derive by doing the things that we like and happiness that we derive by doing the right things irrespective of whether we like it or not. Happiness is not a one-size fits all suit. The activities that lead to happiness in one stage of our life will not lead to happiness in a different stage in life; it might look outright absurdity too. Happiness can’t be expressed well with words but we can recognize moments when we were/are happy (if we are not evaluative or critical).

While I am sleeping do I actually know that I am sleeping? The moment that I try to gauge my level of happiness or if I am happy at all, I am no happier. Happiness can be achieved by being in the moment. Happiness is the fuel that drives life forward. Without happiness, that sense of well-being, what is the point of the pursuit called life? It is better to identify the unique set of activities and things from which we derive happiness than being driven in pursuit of the social stereotypes of happiness. Enough of the philosophical rhetoric on happiness.

Now to the practical aspect of how I experience happiness in my daily life. To me happiness is series of little moments scattered across my entire lifetime. My pursuit of happiness is as unique as me. Below are the list of things/ activities that give/have given me happiness at different times:

  • Unexpected rain on a summer day
  • A sip of water post a bite of chilly
  • Patience to laugh at my own follies
  • The wag of tail by man’s best friend
  • Strange sounds of feathery vagabonds
  • Extended slumber sessions on a holiday
  • The roses that blossom in my rose plant
  • A timeless statue smiling at me in vanity
  • Reading a favorite book at a leisurely pace
  • Kind words by my wife in times of distress
  • Playing a prank on my sisters and friends
  • Unspent money in the wallet at month-end
  • Eternal race of endless waves on the seashore
  • The moment a favorite dish melts in my mouth
  • Pretending to lose to my child in a boxing match
  • A cocktail of music that takes me on a time travel
  • An endless road inviting to an unexplored journey
  • Walk on the seashore while enjoying dawn or dusk
  • Droplets of water hanging on to a leaf like dear life
  • A game of cricket with old buddies on a lazy Sunday
  • The radiant smile of my child after a hard day’s work
  • The aroma of freshly baked bread as I walk past a bakery 
  • A cold water bath of hot day and hot water bath on a cold day
  • A favorite movie whose dialogues that I can remember by heart
  • Stumbling upon an old friend in a crowded market in a new city
  • The new language scripted by my daughter when she started talking
  • As a young boy, holding my parents hands when we went out for a walk
  • The tiny dot of light turning the endless canvas called sky into infinite shades
  • A fraction of heat from the tea mug that seeps into my palm on a cold morning

 

Note: This post has been written for Indiblogger’s Indispire edition 108: ‘What does happiness mean to you? Do you go looking for happiness?’

Book Review: ‘Flow: The classic work on how to achieve happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’

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Flow

If there was one book that was consistently quoted in the books that I read last year, it was ‘Flow: The classic work on how to achieve happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.’ So I had this book on my ‘To Read’ list for quite some time. Even after I have finished reading this book, I still have trouble pronouncing the author’s name. The book is also not a breezy read kind of book and it takes a few pages to get used to the author’s style of writing. Some of the words and phrases that I came across in this book are completely new to me. But the concept that the book deals with has had so much appeal that as per the author it has been translated into 14 different languages.

The basic premise of the book is that happiness is not something that happens to a person. The author argues that Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended by each person. This book summarizes decades of research by the author on the positive aspects of human experience — joy, creativity, and the process of total involvement with life that the author describes as Flow. To put it simply Flow is nothing but the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

The author lays out the common characteristics of optimal experience, i.e. Flow: a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-hound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing. The author also addresses through individual chapters on how one can achieve Flow in activities that require physical skill, in intellectual and artistic pursuits, in one’s current vocation as well in interpersonal relationships. Towards the end of the book the author also handles how one can integrate discrete Flow activities in life into one unified Flow experience. It would be worth paying extra attention to the last chapter, ‘The making of Meaning.’

Some of my favorite lines from the book are:

‘Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of the mind is chaos.’

‘A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening “outside,” just by changing the contents of consciousness.’

‘Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it.’

‘The reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.’

‘Potentiality does not imply actuality, and quantity does not translate into quality.’

‘Purpose, resolution, and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience.’

Overall the book would need extra investment in attention and time but it’s worth the effort. After all the book deals with how any journey can be worth pursuing for its own sake and there is no better place to start following the idea than in reading this very book that espouses the idea. The central idea of the book is so important that following it if not mastering it will greatly enrich our life.