Happiness And His Friends

I think we all have a love-hate relationship with happiness. It is something that everyone talks about, and wishes for. We all want happiness and we don't want suffering. But weirdly enough also, I feel that we all feel confused and angry when our happiness is taken away. We don't know what to do and we feel like it's the end of everything heh. But not really, we just don't know how happiness works.

2016 is without a doubt a very challenging year for me. But it is through all of these challenges that I learn so much about happiness. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I'm even learning not to rely on happiness to make me... Happy. Across the years I've learned that happiness is never something that we chase and look for. It is something we create. But like everything in life, we have to understand that nothing lasts forever. The best way to feel is to really feel everything while they're here.

My meditation days have also taught me a lot to ponder about happiness. When you ask people, how do you define happiness, I am pretty sure everyone will come up with a different definition. To me happiness is a state of bliss where nothing is lacking from you both in reality wise and also psychologically, mindfully and emotionally. And I feel everyone has a different "state" of bliss.

How do we measure this state is what measures our happiness level as a human. The more we crave, the unhappier we become. I remember a saying from the documentary "Our Mind Is Bigger Than All The Supermarket In The World" which I caught at THIS Buddhist film fest 4 years ago. It says we feel unhappy when our mind doesn't get what it wants. And vice versa for happiness.

To me meditation helps to train your mind in this sense too. It is quite challenging to instill gratitude to people in materialism-wise. Can you imagine instilling gratitude to people's mind? I think it's impossible haha. How we can stop craving for thoughts and emotions that are not beneficial to us.

Across the years we've been lured to live in a "definition" of happiness, where actually in reality, we are the only ones who can create our own definition. I'm starting to do this, because really, no one is in charge of our own happiness except for our own self! Not even your parents or friends. 

Since we feel too many unnecessary emotions, we don't realise that we've been wasting time being unhappy. I came up with these lines this year... And I think it helps me a lot.

"At the end of our lives, on our deathbeds, I think we will all be laughing at the amount of time we wasted being unhappy. So hence, be happy. Because one day we will no longer be able to be happy."