Life takes you on a rollercoaster ride as you navigate through your everyday, moving from unconditional happiness to the mundanely neutral to annoyed at the infinitesimal, traversing in between emotions that are perhaps undefinable by our rather limited human intelligence.
There's so much to life, so infinitely more than you can possibly comprehend, and in it all, your naive mind seeks peace, which given anyone's experience is not easily continually attainable. So it is unavoidable that you will pass through an assortment of emotions, uncontrolled mostly. And, in its inertia, the mind will crave the emotion of happiness, always and perpetually. And why should it not? Happiness is akin to putting on rosy glasses to see the world, everything is okay, alright, and there's always a silver lining. Even if there isn't a silver lining, there's always hope, always. Happiness brings peace and contentment that nears Nirvana, the destination for so many seekers, religious and philosophical, from times of yore. And if being so close to this end goal of Nirvana is so easy, why would you not always want to stay in that beautiful place? Pause here and contemplate on this last sentence, maybe read it again.
Now, let's continue.
This persistent want of you and your mind, is my friend, the eternal pursuit of happiness.
In times of joy and contentment this pursuit rests redundant for the goal is reached and the mind is in the proverbial oasis that is peace.
But when things don't go your way, and your thoughts swirl in a tempest constituting of any permutation and combination of annoyance, uncertainty, sadness, jealousy and any other non content emotions that your rather cunning mind is capable of conjuring up, this is when this pursuit takes importance and your mind seeks to again go into its previous state of Nirvana. If you resist at this instance, and stay in this uncomfortable state of mind, two forces affect you simultaneously - the inertial need to return to peace, and the negative energy of the current emotion. You find yourself as the poor rope in this tumultuous tug of war of these two opposing energies, one drawing you to the negative end of the emotional spectrum, and the other to the positive.
At this Y junction where you need to make a decision, between staying emotionally discontent, versus seeking happiness, is where the most profound of realisations lurks - ‘You can simply follow inertia to your place of tranquility and Nirvana and deal with the practicalities of what got you into a discontent state from there’. Let’s see how this can be done.
Discontentment always rises from a stimulus, external or internal which is either within or outside your control; And to this discontentment, there is either a solution or simply there is no solution to it, and it becomes a part of your existence. In the former, you need to find and act on the solution, and in the latter, since there is nothing that can be done, then why worry.
And I think this practical handling of the problem can be easily done from your oasis of Nirvana, no? Simply put, you have a choice to always remain happy and content, even in the face of adversities and inconveniences, for you make it a point to solve them from a place of contentment. And in this pursuit of happiness, you actively avoid those arid climes of dither. In doing so, you’d notice that your mental faculties are better placed to deal with the circumstances at hand, for they are not also dealing with the inertial tug of war we discussed before, as the mind is simply at peace.
This paradigm, once embraced leaves you where you always wanted to be - in the wondrous lap of Nirvana.
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