City Hall

It looks impressive to me!

The Pursuit Of Happiness

Nah, this isn’t about the Will Smith movie (opening in theatres soon!). It’s about our pursuits of happiness. This is a fairly difficult topic to broach because of the complexity and variety of ways that we define happiness. As is often heard, “It’s all relative”.

For most of us, happiness is a subjective non-measurable metric through which we evaluate the status of our lives. If we’re happy, our lives are going well. If we’re not happy, then something’s wrong. Most of us live in the pursuit of happiness. We define our current state of lives as “content” or “bearable” and point out umpteen changes that would lead to our happiness.

It’s hard being a happy person in our current world. You often face obstacles and you often get kicked down. Each time, you become more cynical and more critical. Hope becomes a word and you begin to doubt yourself. It becomes pretty easy to lose sight of your goal or to give up on it completely.

Yet, I’ll make a bold statement and say that most of our targets in life are trivial. Goals can come and go but once you start to lose hope and begin to doubt yourself, that’s when things start going bad. Unfortunately, I can’t find the right quote but it went along the lines of “You don’t lose when you fail. You lose when you quit!”.

***Warning!!! Nerd Talk To Follow***

A friend of mine in a new relationship is worried that being her boyfriend’s first girlfriend, he won’t know what it’s like to love her and might end up misinterpreting his feelings. I don’t know if there’s any truth behind her logic, but let’s apply it to our Pursuit of Happiness. How will we know that we’re finally “happy”? What defines happiness? What was the final change that made you say “I’m no longer content! I’m happy!”? And how do you know there’s another change that would make you say “NOW I’m happy. I was wrong to think I was happy before!”?

This entire theory is flawed. First of all, you’re not happy at the flip of a switch. There are varying degrees of happiness. You could be happy in situation A but even happier in situation B. It’s up to you to decide how much happiness you’ll gain from putting in the effort of changing your situation. To be scientific about this, you could perform a cost-benefit analysis. By evaluating the difference in happiness points and the duration of the additional happiness, you could decide whether it’s worth the energy.

***End***

Enough nerd-speak. Let’s break this down. The last paragraph really had nothing to do with anything I wanted to say except for the main point. “There are varying degrees of happiness”. As Sociology keeps trying to hammer home, people need to avoid “Binary Thinking”. Not all things can be classified as black or white, good or bad, etc. That’s a concept that I can agree with but for the sake or arguing (perish the thought that I admit I’m wrong), those classifications mainly arise when you complicate matters. If you can keep things simple (yes, my dreaded “Simplify” Theory), then it’s easier (not always) to evaluate things.

So, let’s define happiness again. I can’t speak for everyone here so I’ll use myself as the muse.

As your muse, I’ll start off by stating that I do not know what happiness is other than a feeling. Do I think I’m happy or do I feel that I’m merely content? I believe I’m happy! Yet, how did I arrive at this conclusion? If I look back over the past four months, do I see moments that would have deterred my happiness or contributed to it? Yes, I do. I see examples of both. Yet, here I am, declaring that I’m happy. Can I think of anything that I’d change over the past four months? Not really, no.

So far, I’ve been looking at my life as it is. Based on the current state of my life, I can conclude that I’m happy. As most of you know, I don’t like to deal with “What If?”s. So, maybe that contributes to my happiness. I don’t spend my time wondering about what I would do if I had better grades or if I had more money or if my entire family always got what they wanted.

I’ve been using an analogy of closed doors quite often, as of late. To place it in context, imagine yourself traversing a rectangular shaped box that has been divided into several rooms arranged linearly. This is your life. You’re going from one end to the other with no backtracking. Each time you pass a room, you MUST close the door behind you. I’m not saying this is how I live my life but let me apply it to my life. I tend to remain focused on what’s at hand and where I’m going. That is, I’m always dealing with what is in the room with me and with opening the next door. Each time I’m done with a room, I go through and I close the door. There’s no looking back. More rules are coming to mind to make this game more applicable to what I’m trying to say but I’ll forego them for the sake of simplicity.

Consider this with a person who keeps turning back to the past. Keeps opening the last door to reflect on how things were left in the last room. This person is spending their energy and time on looking at what lies behind them.

I realise the flaws. My style would mean I reach the end quickly… what then? I choke and die? But forget that. The main question is… is there anything wrong with reflecting on the past? No! Because you can learn from it and you can remember all the fond memories. Yet, once you start spending your time on the negatives. Wishing that you could change them – that’s when you’re falling into a pit. These are the “What if?s”.

I digress. Having said all that, what if I could change things in my life? I don’t know what I’d change. There are so many things that come to mind. Yet, I’ve made my peace with them. So my answer would be that I’d change nothing! And that’s why I can claim I’m happy! When both my “As Is” and my “What If?” lives are the same, then it’s supporting evidence of my happiness.

I’m well aware that there are scenarios out there that I’m not considering. As “Bundar” kept trying to convince me yesterday, I was potentially depriving myself of additional happiness based on a decision I had made. Yet, if we work on the concept of degrees of happiness, then I could spend my entire life making decisions that I believe would make me happier and then potentially ruing missed opportunities or wrong decisions.

Although I could have made this point immediately, it would have ended up an extremely short blog. The problem is not that we pursue happiness. The problem is that we don’t accept happiness. We’re almost always looking for that little bit more. We don’t want to settle. Call it greed or call it high standards. We need to realise that what we have is more than what most people in the world have. We need to realise that spending our entire lives going for that extra few points is not what is going to make us happy. In the end, it’s being satisfied with what you have.

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” - Guillaume Apollinaire

Stupidity!

I was talking to “Punchoo” a couple of weeks ago and although it was unfortunate that we only managed to talk for a few minutes, she said something along the lines of “To me, you’ll always be the guy who walked through the school corridors wearing a box on your head”. I had completely forgotten about that! That thought just came back to me and it made me wonder what other stupid things I may have done. I’m having trouble with all of the ones that had some hilarity to them. I figured I’d list whatever came to mind at the moment for future reference.

Roamed school corridors wearing a box on my head

Placed a yellow panda-mouse umbrella on my Student Life Coordinator’s chair and pretended to talk to it while he stood behind me

Played catch with a sharp-edged piece of plastic. Still got the scar from that one

Took a few jumps sitting on the frame bar of a cycle. Explains my voice

Gave my Calculus professor a standing ovation as he entered the class

Woken up really early to give wake-up calls and then gone back to sleep

Woken up really early to help someone out and gone back to sleep upon return

Shoulder-tackled a car door for two minutes hoping to break it off

Fought over steaming fish fingers. Still got the scar from that one

Allowed the auto recoil from a vacuum cleaner’s power cable to deflect off my leg. Still got the scar from that one

Punched a wall

Dove through a fountain of water in sub-zero temperatures and then went to eat a shawerma

Placed a whoopee-cushion on my English teacher’s chair

Sampled evil concoctions made from mixing all leftover food on a table

Jabbed a pin into my brother after watching Tom & Jerry

Told some of the lamest jokes in the history of mankind! “You won’t be walking to school on Saturday!”

Filled a box of cigarettes with water to prevent anyone from smoking them. Actually, that was smart!

Played tag with an excited Alsatian. Loudest scream of fear ever!

Cheered for the opposing team in a bar full of rabid fans!

Smashed my G-Shock into a wall to test its durability. Display’s gone but the watch still works! Alarm still beeps at 12:15 PM daily – even 6 years later!

Tried to convince (successfully) a British air stewardess that my English accent was genuine


There are still so many things left to do! The one that’s foremost on my mind is to wear a balaclava, carefully carry a box in front of security, accidentally drop it and dive for cover screaming “Oh crud! It’s going to blow!” or try to run out of the building and crash into the door pretending to be knocked out. I just need to find my partners in crime!

Eternal Slumber

I only have 20 odd minutes before I have to go to bed but I figured that I’ll quickly write something. Every time my blog has come to mind over the past year or so, the more I’ve realised that it holds very little value to me and that I have little motivation to continue it. However, it is my only source of literary creativity until I can return to writing my story.

When it comes to deciding on the future of my blog, I think about shutting it down. Then I wonder about just leaving it up but not updating it. And if all else fails, I could always do the damned and make it into an amateur photo blog.

Sleep has been an issue wandering through my mind these days. I’ve often talked about my sleeping habits but they appear to have changed slightly. I’m still a very light sleeper and I still need very little sleep but I’ve noticed recently how my sleeping habits have changed to reflect my attitude towards sleep… i.e. it’s a waste of time!

Given my day-to-day schedules, I can get however many hours of sleep as I wish. Since the recommendations are for 8 hours 15 minutes, I aim for that. Yet, I find myself waking up after 6 hours and every half hour from that point on. The first thought that always goes through my mind as soon as I wake up, is to check the time. A quick glance and I’ve instantly calculated how much longer before I’ve completed the recommended hours or before I absolutely must get up. When I was in high-school, I loved the feeling of waking up in an air-conditioned room, all snug and cosy under my blanket and then realising I still had more time to sleep. Now, as soon as I wake up, I’m thinking that I could get out of bed immediately but should make my body rest some more.

I think it would be interesting to spend a few days of my vacation operating on my own internal clock. To ignore what the clocks say and just sleep when I’m dead tired. Then wake up when I’m refreshed regardless of how many hours I’ve slept. If my body accepts that routine, then I’ll appreciate having the extra hours of the day available to me.

There were times when I used to lie down in to bed, absolutely exhausted. Knowing that I could finally rest was such a lovely feeling! Snuggling in to bed and feeling my entire body relax and go loose. Shortly after, I’d be fast asleep. Now, I don’t feel that tiredness anymore. No matter how many hours I’ve been awake, I still feel wide awake when I lie down to go to sleep. I have to make myself lie down to sleep otherwise it feels like I could keep going. I have to force my body to relax and even then, I’m calculating the time that I could wake up and the time by which I should be up.

It’s a good thing, one would think. Not having to feel tired anymore. I agree – not being tired means I can kick the Energiser bunny’s butt! Yet, that feeling was nice. To take a deep breath and enjoy knowing that the day is over and all’s done! I wouldn’t give up this endless energy for a pleasant feeling.

Anyhow, my 20 minutes are up.