Happiness – A Habit and Not Event

Happiness – A Habit and Not Event

Over the years the word Happiness has made me very curious as what exactly it means and how exactly comes and what is its importance in our day to day life. How its presence (or absence) drives a person and most importantly – is it permanent or is it a passing phase? Can we measure its genuineness?

I believe that definition of happiness is different for individuals. For some it is in proportional to what they achieve while some people feel happy when they reach the peak through their individual brilliance while still there are some people who are happy when they achieve something big collectively as a team and share the accomplishments with each other.

In all the examples above there is one common element though – Happiness is momentary when you achieve something or you scale some peak. After sometime the position or peak that you have achieved becomes routine and habit and the proportion of happiness wanes gradually thus bringing us back to where we started from and a new effort begins to gain another set of new heights and peaks.

This ever-changing position gives us happiness for sometime but it is not sustainable to last infinitely.

Perhaps, most familiar form of happiness is the presence of positive emotions within ourselves, it is a sensation of feeling good in what we do and how we react to a situation. Happiness, to me is the absence of reactions and presence of response with positivity and optimism that helps in dealing with circumstances / situations such that it brings positive outcome. It is the way I orient my thoughts.

It is an aura that reflects from our behavior, mannerisms, thought process and inner development. It is about self-compassion, gratitude, minimizing expectations from others, altruism, mindfulness, etc.   

Perpetuity of Happiness inculcates over a period and by imbibing gratitude, forgiveness & seek forgiveness. It varies from person to person and has different definition for different people. However, it can be permanent bliss if comes from within. It is about the perspective that we build to infer the things.

Pankaj Maheshwari

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