How About Celebrating The Small Joys?
Pulkit Sharma
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We often desperately wait for splendid moments, big festivals, and huge victories in order to be ebullient. People may spend days, months, years and even a whole lifetime in the hope of experiencing staggering joy . For a majority, happiness does not exist in the present but seems to be distantly encapsulated in an idealised future. No wonder that almost everyone finds life to be encumbered with relentless misery and pain. But joy can be found easily provided we change our mental attitude.Firstly, we often believe that bliss is dependent on ideal external circumstances and if we can manage to reach there we will be ecstatic. But the truth is that external reality rarely fulfils our wishful fantasies. In order to be joyful, a dependence on external circumstances is likely to make us frustrated. Happiness can only be found within by focussing on deeper goals and making deeper connections with everyone around us.
Secondly , we erroneously think that till the time we continue to have problems we cannot be happy . But happiness is a matter of choice; we can choose to rise above all the pain and difficulty by enlarging ourselves. With practice, we can inspire our mind to be ecstatic by focussing on positive aspects of our selves and the world around us.
Thirdly , we ridiculously equate happiness with materialism and its big, grand and larger-than-life entities. The fact is that materialism only gives us excitement and a sense of short-lived achievement but not happiness. A recent research published in the journal Psychological Science found that big money impairs the ability of people to savour everyday positive emotions and experiences, and therefore paradoxically tends to make them unhappy .
Let us face it, big joys are hard to come by and involve a lot of effort and huge costs. If we were to just sit and wait for those isolated peak moments we will end up creating room for a lot of negativity and misery in our lives. In order to be positive, we must find joy in small things. This can be done easily by opening ourselves emotionally to abundant goodness that life offers every day and cultivating gratitude for it.
Sri Aurobindo reasoned that our inability to experience the full delight of existence derives from the mind's hedonistic currents of pain and pleasure. On the contrary , for the universal soul, all things and their experience carry rasa, the essence of delight.Because we ignore this essence and just focus on how things affect our hedonistic currents, we are cut off from abundant joy .
The Mother emphasised that all of us potentially carry the inner sun.Because we strongly identify with our separateness and do not regard ourselves as fluid and malleable, we are unable to transform. Once we overcome this faulty identification, the inner sun of divine laughter will manifest within and its radiance will dissolve all sorrows.
Whether it is basking in the warmth of the sun, listening to a soothing melody , having a heart-warming conversation with someone close, seeing small children explore the world, getting some support when we are in need, feeling inspired by an ideal, helping others go about their lives and doing run-of-the-mill tasks creatively there is a lot that life offers us.
All we need to do is to overcome our sense of separateness and hedonism so that we can get connected to the cosmos and experience bliss in all its manifestations. This will enable us to be continuously nourished by the small joys we have in abundance.
(The writer is a clinical psychologist.)
Secondly , we erroneously think that till the time we continue to have problems we cannot be happy . But happiness is a matter of choice; we can choose to rise above all the pain and difficulty by enlarging ourselves. With practice, we can inspire our mind to be ecstatic by focussing on positive aspects of our selves and the world around us.
Thirdly , we ridiculously equate happiness with materialism and its big, grand and larger-than-life entities. The fact is that materialism only gives us excitement and a sense of short-lived achievement but not happiness. A recent research published in the journal Psychological Science found that big money impairs the ability of people to savour everyday positive emotions and experiences, and therefore paradoxically tends to make them unhappy .
Let us face it, big joys are hard to come by and involve a lot of effort and huge costs. If we were to just sit and wait for those isolated peak moments we will end up creating room for a lot of negativity and misery in our lives. In order to be positive, we must find joy in small things. This can be done easily by opening ourselves emotionally to abundant goodness that life offers every day and cultivating gratitude for it.
Sri Aurobindo reasoned that our inability to experience the full delight of existence derives from the mind's hedonistic currents of pain and pleasure. On the contrary , for the universal soul, all things and their experience carry rasa, the essence of delight.Because we ignore this essence and just focus on how things affect our hedonistic currents, we are cut off from abundant joy .
The Mother emphasised that all of us potentially carry the inner sun.Because we strongly identify with our separateness and do not regard ourselves as fluid and malleable, we are unable to transform. Once we overcome this faulty identification, the inner sun of divine laughter will manifest within and its radiance will dissolve all sorrows.
Whether it is basking in the warmth of the sun, listening to a soothing melody , having a heart-warming conversation with someone close, seeing small children explore the world, getting some support when we are in need, feeling inspired by an ideal, helping others go about their lives and doing run-of-the-mill tasks creatively there is a lot that life offers us.
All we need to do is to overcome our sense of separateness and hedonism so that we can get connected to the cosmos and experience bliss in all its manifestations. This will enable us to be continuously nourished by the small joys we have in abundance.
(The writer is a clinical psychologist.)
