Reaching the Shrine of Love through the Wooded Path of Happiness

 

Do you find the mythologically grand idea of love and compassion too much for you? No worries. Relax. I would ask you to hold the nose from a more convenient angle. You may find it more lucrative for the self in its direct form. Guys, it’s about happiness. Target happiness. The world is yet to see a happy person who isn’t loving in nature. 

And mind you, happiness can be taken as simple as breathing.

It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the line in future. Some house, some power, some position, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness, pushing it more and more distant from us.

I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. Then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Relentlessly we just push on while happiness stays a distant goal never to be achieved. The biggest folly is that we make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we perish. Huge immortals as they are. In pushing for them, we die, separated from happiness that could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.

We keep on forgetting to celebrate the milestone that we had promised to ourselves to enjoy on reaching it. It happens because the moment we reach there, the mirage shifts further down the line. It’s thus our destiny to be in the journey. Here lies the key. The journey itself is its own reward.

The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like we store some grains for the harsh winters, near us, in the safest part of our house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Just being happy and living for a day. We have to learn to separate being from becoming.

You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness that could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free from the chains of goal-setting and placed it unchained from those unreachable spots in the future.

Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Do everything as a happy person; instead of doing the deeds to become a happy person. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes us. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to go far and high.

So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, instead of slogging it out to become happy later. Fella, kindly decide to keep happiness as a routine, let it take possession of your present, like a monkey eating fruits, the birds flying and the trees standing with stoic muse. All in the present. Now. Just being so. Simply being happy. This is the natural state of each and everything in nature. Had it been otherwise the system would have collapsed under the heat of agitation.

It pays the way to reach a stage when you find it actually possible to become happy without any reasons. Choiceless happiness and loving kindness are same by the way.