My Happiness Is My Right

Oh..How the very sentence has welcomed so many sneers!! This sentence reveals everything that has been scorned by the moral pundits since time immemorial – selfishness, egoist, apathetic, etc.,etc. And how naively we have followed them!! Not seeking our own happiness and instead sacrificing it for others has been so well instilled in each of us that the very mention of it shocks us….I just happen to give a thought to it and this is what has transpired!!
My journey started with a simple question that I asked myself. A question whose answer is the fundamental block of our life and that is -Why had we come on earth? I am sure most of us have thought about it at some point of our lives. Do you remember the answer that you got? Well I remember my answer. It was simple and quite obvious but shocking as well. It was to live!! So I started about analyzing how I “Live” my life. Strangely I found there have been very few moments when I have actually “lived” like the 2 min. I snatched from mid-work to listen to my favorite song, or the whole night I spent reading the novel that I always wanted to read, or the minutes I spent sitting in the temple alone worrying about absolutely nothing…or the moment when someone glanced at my work admiringly, the work which had been my baby..“Living” as a concept is meant to be an enjoyable experience. The high points of one’s life or enjoyment have always been the happiest moments…But I noticed that those high points have been very few. What I found instead is unfulfilled dreams, crippled ambitions, stifled emotions and dying enthusiasm for life! I found that I no more dream about being a great novelist because people said dreams need not be always true. I found that I slog in front of the PC everyday instead of writing articles because people said only engineers have a future. I found that I can’t be with someone right now because people said that he is not enough for me. Why? Why is it that our courses of life has always been charted by what people surrounding us think and do? Why have we never tried to break free of those shackles and instead went about doing what our deepest desires dictated us? Why have we been always apprehensive about our gut feeling even when we know that is the right thing for us to do? Why? The answer is we have been taught everything that is anti-life. We have been taught that dreams are illusionary not to be taken seriously. Instead we should adopt a more “realistic” approach by abandoning them and listening to others. We have been taught that no matter what you aspire to become it’s not worth taking the risk because they know it better. So we end up doing work we don’t enjoy making the action of making money a mechanical activity and dirty. We have been taught that it is not your feeling towards a person that is important but his caste and religion. So we end up in relationships neither we cherish nor respect. We have them because it is supposed to be that way; we love them because we are supposed to love them. Do we call this living? Why do we listen to them? This is an interesting question. The answer lies in the centuries of “moral values” we have been fed on. Our model of morality has done everything to belittle the person, the human being in you. It has made sure that it removes every speck of individuality in you. Take for example your job. No matter what you have studied you are right now in IT coding. What has led you to this industry? Your “interest” in it? Sadly no. You are here because everyone said that IT is the “In” thing! You are here because everyone said that’s where money lies. And you are here because your neighbor is earning in six figures and your family will feel bad if you don’t earn that much! And how will we feel if we found someone who has actually followed his dreams? I should feel so happy when I would meet a person who is actually enjoying his/her work!! Or is it?? Don’t you think you will immediately start feeling insecure about that person? You start feeling jealous of him...of his happiness. Thus comes the climax of our set of morals!!- Scared of happiness in life when that should have been the only motive in our lives!
Our pack of morals has succeeded in suppressing the greatness that we as individuals could have achieved if we would have followed our mind. Mind you I am not talking about heart but mind. Mind, your working computer. Our hearts have been corrupted by the emotional tantrums our surrounding throws every time we try to listen to it. All that is left with us is our mind, our conscious that reminds us of the person that we are. Our mind always directs us to the things that celebrate the essence of life, that is, happiness. But our conditioning has been such that we have lost track of it and instead try to follow the code that has been laid. Its time we listen to it. We are here to “live” life. We are here to experience that highest form of happiness that none of the other living beings can that of knowledge of being alive, of being happy. The highest form of happiness is not an “out-of-world” concept that our moralists claim...We don’t need to seek it in the temples or high up in the sky. Its here, within you, waiting to be claimed. It is that child of yours which has been branded as illegitimate by our “gurus”. It’s not too late. Come, let us assert our right to be happy and for a change live life!!