The Solution to happiness

Its Diwali. You are very young, you like those little red dots. They burst when thrown on a wall, they burst when you use them in toy guns, they burst when rubbed against a wall. You enjoy rockets too.

You get a year or two older, and you enjoy those little crackers rolled in red paper. You burst them all day, in tin cans, under leaves, under rocks, in bottles. That and you enjoy rockets with little plastic men in parachutes coming out of them.

You get a couple of years older, and you enjoy those ‘atom’ bombs, the crackers wrapped in green rope. These are more potent with louder bangs. Now, you enjoy rockets with colorful fireworks. The larger the better.

You get a few years older, and you no longer find interest in crackers. But if you were shown the detonation of dynamite anywhere, you would perhaps leap at the opportunity.

Life is a little like that. The smaller things that we enjoyed as youngsters, we take of granted. They no longer interest us and we want more. We want bigger things. We want more exclusive things. We begin to lose track of what makes us happy and why. The wonder and amazement falls off the wagon and nothing we have or had seems enough. We compare and then we compare some more. The little things in life that should give us happiness no more do. Call it an inescapable journey which each of us must tread. Happiness is at a premium and our quest seems unending.

We often want to go back to childhood, when we were less jaded and those little red dots and flower pots gave us the most happiness in life. But we cannot.

We know we must find a way out, we know that we might never be able to go back to the innocence where the smallest of things gave us the most happiness, like a grandfather buying a cheap little plastic car. You were on top of the world! Today anything less than a nice plush real car would not give that kind of happiness.

So how do we get back to true happiness, the kind that we had when we were younger?

I don’t really know.

There are a lot of questions that each of us have. There are a lot of short comings. And answers are not always at arms length. This passage is not about absolute solutions.

As the old saying goes, a man must be taught to fish, not given it.
So here is the deal.

Knowing that there is a problem is the solution.
It is not the answer, but it is the first step to that basic happiness.

We all have issues and problems, and acknowledging that we do, is that first step to an answer – the prologue to a solution.

The truth is, answers to some questions we will never find, answers to some, we will in time. But regardless of whether we do or not, just knowing that there are short comings will help us build on ourselves.

Knowledge and acknowledge will help us know understand where we stand against ourselves. It will help us emerge as stronger individuals, aware individuals.

The first stage of a solution to happiness is in that acknowledgement.