We hear from people everyday that we as humans should not be chasing money, fame or success, rather we should be happy. One who learns to love and forgive is a happy person.
Love and forgive
Evolution has programmed humans for survival, not happiness. All our endeavors at chasing money, fame or success is to ensure that we survive. Therefore the question still remains, how to be happy? What is happiness? A person who can love and forgive is generally considered a happy person. This can be seen very clearly when we are around little kids. Little kids make mistakes. They throw tantrums. They break things around, shout on the top of their voice, don’t obey, misbehave, etc… And yet, when we are with kids, we feel happy. The reason being, we love kids and we readily forgive them for all their misbehavior. Similarly, kids also love us and they never hold a grudge against us for scolding them or not allowing them to jump off that tall slide.
Our own self
The first person we encounter when we wake up is our own self. The last person we encounter when we go to bed is also our own self. And yet, we are always critical of this person, always judging this person for each of his/her actions, always finding faults with everything this person says or does. Clearly we don’t love this person. We hold grudges against this person for what he/she did in the past, for what he/she said, for his/her failures. We are not forgiving towards this person as well. Can this person be happy?
If our view of our own self is so judgemental and full of grudges, what will be our view of the world around us? Do we tend to judge people around us, do we hold grudges against people? Can we keep anybody in the world happy? The short answer is, YES, we can!
Projections
We tend to project our emotions when we look at others. And as we are geared for survival, we know innately that allowing those emotions out would mean alienating those people. So we bottle up our emotions, our judgements, our grudges deep and carry it all around with us. It weighs us down and it weighs down on our relationship with those people as well. And lugging around so much of weight is really exhausting. Instead, if we look at those people with love and forgive their mistakes or short-comings, we can have a happy relationship with them. And as a side-effect, we can let go off the weight and just be happy.
Evolution
Blame evolution all you will however survival for the fittest has allowed us to be on top of the food chain. It has paved way for all the advancements mankind has made. And yet, we are trapped by the caveman instincts, always afraid, always looking out for our own survival. So is there no way out? Can our mind never learn to be happy at all?
To overcome our caveman instincts, we need to overcome the fear of failure. We need to stop judging our own self. We need to stop beating ourselves up for our failures. i.e. we need to love our selves and we need to forgive ourselves. If we can do this simple thing and evolve, I am sure each one of us can be happy. Whatever we have in abundance, we share with others. Let’s build abundance of happiness within us so we can share it with others too…