Inhale Your Portion of Wellness

It’s a lush green forest around you. Birds are chirping. It’s early morning and a cool breeze is blowing. Nearby, gurgling waters of a brook add music to the stillness around. You feel better. It feels good. The external orderliness, peace and calm raise the bar of your better feeling. With the same set of your own individual, internal, self-specific problems, worries and concerns, you feel better if the surrounds are better.

The desert sand is burning. It’s noon and forget about trees, you cannot see even a blade of grass for miles. You feel horrible. You feel bad. You find yourself worse than your self-specific set of worries make you feel normally. You feel bad if the surroundings are not convenient.

We cannot inhale in isolation. Or put more simply, we cannot exist in isolation in this universe. We are just put somewhere in the chain of interdependence. If there is misery in the air, it will enter your lungs. Use air-masks and air filters, do whatever. Life still will be stifling and genuine efforts just a struggle because we cannot help inhaling our share of the miseries prevailing around. The solution lies in cutting down on the pollutants. Not in wearing masks. When it comes to our struggle to increase our happiness, the efforts are almost as useless as wearing masks when the air is polluted.  Fighting the consequences is never the durable solution, fighting the cause is.

Our own set of factors that make life either good or bad are not the sole deciding elements in making us happy or unhappy. If we are happy, then we are just sharing a fraction of the overall happiness surrounding us. Our lungs are safe just in proportion to the purity of the air around. If the quality of air is good, only then the individual battles like quitting smoking, eating healthy food and doing yoga to keep your lungs safe will be meaningful.

If we are unhappy, that also is a fraction of the overall misery spread around. Individual is just a constituent of the whole. Happiness is drawn from the overall pool. How long the frogs will sing songs of self-gratification in a vanishing muddy pond? Its waters vaporizing. Its shoreline decreasing. Stanching green mossy puddle. What can be drawn out of it? Only death and misery, not life and happiness.   

A talented software engineer, with his tools of prosperity and happiness, is of no use at a place like Somalia. There is no surrounding prosperity to help him nurture his talent. There is no supportive economy and companies to help him contribute to the overall wellness and get a fraction of the happiness in return. A software engineer prospers in America because using his skills he can contribute to and earn back a fraction of the happiness spread around.         

The surroundings set the stage for either make or break.

“Love thy neighbor!” By loving others you are loving yourself. By caring for others, you are caring for yourself. By contributing to others’ happiness, you are adding to your own happiness because your share of happiness and prosperity will be just a fraction of the overall happiness around. With your effort and skills, you draw a big portion if the social forest around you is healthy like the natural forest where each breath installs new vitality in you.

Long before you really start doing something to add to the overall wellness around you, start with a simple practice. You might be busy with scores of neck-breaking responsibilities, leaving you with very little time for real action on the goodness front. Start thinking good of others. Think good for your surroundings. Be happy over others’ victories. Smile over somebody’s stroke of luck. Feel bad for somebody’s loss. Say some sympathetic words as well. Over the years, the goodness in its womb will get healthy. It will deliver a healthy baby. And sooner or later, you will definitely ‘do’ something to add to the overall goodness around you before you finish your journey.

You will then have a larger share from the pool of wellness. When the sun will be setting and you preparing to enter the night for long deserved rest, you will walk into the forest with well-meaning steps. It will be a far happier retirement than it would have been otherwise.