What does it mean to be truly happy? Is being happy “the other” alternative to being successful? At times life’s simplest things tend to confuse you the most. You can easily choose to lie back on your sofa, drink a cup of coffee, relax and be happy. But wait, wouldn’t you also call that being lazy? It is an issue worthy of an argument if we were to draw a clear line between ‘being happy’ and ‘being complacent’. Being successful is yet another story altogether. It hums the chants of ‘hard work’, ‘perspiration’, ‘determination’ and turning failure inside-out! Well, that clearly rings the bells of our inner desires loud and clear, doesn’t it? So you see, it’s all about the malicious play of ‘desires’ on us which instigates the whole rat race in the very first place. And the scary, yet the eventual part about it is that there is no end to it… our desires never tend to cease.
These questions never fail baffling my mind for I wonder how far one’s desires would really take a person in life. I remember once I discussed these qualms on happiness with a group of my senior students, and I was rather glad that they could also see the sublime paradox between happiness and desire. Although they are occasionally preached to be as different as black from white, they are not as distinctly separate entities on a deeper thought.
Religion has also had an impactful perspective over the distinction between happiness and desire, for we have the belief that no enlightenment is possible with our mind attached to desires. Yet I wonder about the very ‘desire’ to attain enlightenment, is there no flavor of desire sprinkled on the very thought of striving at all cost to attain the so called enlightenment? Anyways let me not deviate from the more practical, more relevant paradox between the ideologies on Happiness and Desires. In this ever so greedily blooming world, even if a man is happiness-driven, how long will he escape the tantalizing lure of worldly desires? And the world has already seen enough of ugly naked plays of desires.
Personally, I cannot (nor I choose to) separate these two “entities”. I genuinely believe that the two are one of the primary aspects of human nature and they are basically emotions, not entities. It is hardly possible to think of a person without any of the two emotions. For, even the greatest spiritual one would have the desire to see his fellow human beings happier.
Yet, I strongly believe that there is a difference, the difference in the shade you choose to color your desires with. It’s only the kind of desires a person nurtures that eventually defines the happiness he or she attains. It is the balance between the two that equates the solution of peace and harmony.
This very need of ‘balance’ brings us back to the ageless Buddhist ideology of “the middle path”. Its essence is in the whole paradigm shift of one’s perspective with humility and humbleness. This change, however, is in no sense of being submissive and nodding to everything, but it paves out a way that is neither too overpowering nor too submitting. This perspective is in a synchronized understanding of all the aspects of chaos around us. It doesn’t simply label something ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but it enables you to be aware of every bad in good and respect every good in bad. So, even as we think about the two emotions of “Happiness” and “Desires”, let us not be simply influenced any of the two but try and build our own perspective with a balanced flare of both the emotions.
