Happy - Or is it just you?

The road to happiness is always under construction - readers digest

If you know what you are looking for, you can always find it! And it hold for happiness as well.

We decide to be happy, sad & angry based on our past experience, and we choose to be and if you look at it close enough, you can choose to be happy, sad or angry for any given situation.

Consider the situation: a person slips and falls. Like my friend Vinayak said, falling was made funny by Charlie Chaplin. Before him, it was really not that funny. Yes you might say that you have not seen Charlie Chaplin, but there are those who did and on seeing others react to the situation, we too have caught up.

It is interesting that all incidents in our lives somehow affect a future event. When a certain incident happens for the first time you won’t really know how to react but its as if we are programmed to learn from the surroundings and catch up with life.

Suppose you are new to cricket and see that Sachin has hit a century before getting out. You won’t know if you should be happy, if it’s a milestone, won’t know his past and won’t know the importance of a century. At this point, the incident goes un-noticed, but your mind keeps track of all reactions to this situation from people around you.

However, you can decide to be:

• Sad that Sachin got out.
• Angry that a guy got Sachin out.
• Happy that you get to see the next player play in the field.

(Suppose you choose to support Sachin at that point.)

So its in your hand how you decide to treat a situation. Its not like there are a set of rules as we can perceive it. but there is certainly a pattern in happiness.

I have begun with cricket, because its the most popular game in the country, the result of this observation can be generalized to all games including chess, football, basketball, tennis, table-tennis, carom, and further generalized to all vents that include commerce, trade, economics, science, geography, humanity, culture etc...

And here we are, focusing on one incident trying to come up with a reaction based on the outcome of an incident and trying to get ourselves accepted in the society (Yes it's that complicated (~_^)!). 

Flies and wasps swarm around a lamp because before the invention of light bulb, nature has instructed them to move towards the moon light during the night, but this artificial source of light has had a greater effect in influencing their behaviour.

Similarly, we have an inner intuition of how we are supposed to react to incidents. Yet this often gets ignored because of the daily experiences that we all tend to have. (TY)