Each day, I come across a new reason to feel grateful. Growing up, the information my naive mind picked up was to grow up with good grades, get into a good college, find a good job, get married to a good man, raise good kids and show them the same good path.

I feel grateful for my exposure to different cultures, good books, open minded people, spirituality and plenty of failures that helped me paint a new picture of life. A picture that taught me we are the very embodiment of happiness. We aren’t aboard some train and we don’t need to become something or someone in order to reach the destination of happiness. There is no doubt, things we have been conditioned to believe as success make us happy. But then, like the Economics principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility, we experience a dopamine spike from the so called success or thrill initially. We then see it jump, followed by plateau and finally see it take a dip.

In simple words, we as humans give too much imoprtance to happiness. And apparently, the way to happiness passes through success, sometimes, adventure or even newness. We are never told that we are enough. And that there is no need to chase happiness.

A bit to strong to digest?

If someone had said this to me until a a couple of years ago, I too would have a strong reaction to this. My mind would go, “ya, right!”, in an utterly demeaning tone. But sometimes losing something you hold too tight forces you to reconsider the meaning of happiness. And like they say, you cannot learn to drive a car by reading a manual. And so, you cannot navigate the waters of life without a storm.

I feel grateful that I am able to distinguish between being happy with or without any pre-conditions.

P.S. It is a tough ride. To experience the loss of what you believed was yours. It is more than tough to believe that one can be happy without anything more than oneself. It is absolutely incredible that we have the choice to learn to let go and experience more happiness than we did before. Letting go does not mean becoming a loser. Or giving up on your dreams. It simply means being able to practice dispassion!