Reflections › Happiness
What does it take to be happy, huh?
I recently moved to Baltimore 2 months back (long story - worth telling another day) and it had been a super long time since I had gotten my hair cut. 3 months. Even though it didn’t look like it. I tell you - I could feel the weight, the expectations (jk).
Nevertheless, I was waiting to get this one conference deadline off my back and now that it was done, I had no excuse to not get my hair cut.
After taking a bunch of recommendations from my few representative friends in Baltimore, I decided to go to Hampden, which is just one of the coolest places, don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
Old Bank barbers. Recommend 100%.
I’ve found in my 20+ years of getting haircuts, that barbers have the ability to enter your headspace in more than one way.
Something about how vulnerable you turn out when you hand over your front end appearance to another person
But I’ve found it hard to be pretentious/diplomatic when soemone is this close to shaving off my ear. And Ky was no different. While we initially spoke about how I apparently need to try out the Baltimore crabs, the conversation quickly shifted to far more important topics. Turns out Ky was a middle school science teacher but 4 years back he decided that he was not happy, and somehow he found a way to be happy - going to barbering school (this was a culture shock to me!) and becoming a hair-dresser. But - this brought me back to an over-whelming question.
Happiness! A question that has occupied my mind for a good part of the last year or so. I’ve always tried to reason my path to happiness - because for sure I know that when I am happy, I like my life. I like waking up. I like to plan to achieve something everyday. I also enjoy my progress at the end of the day. Conversely, I’ve seen that nothing can change how I perceive my life. Self-doubt. Dissatisfication. All of them creep in. And nothing is ever enough to feel better than what I felt before I did anything. So - yes - happiness is essential, it is a must. We must plan to achieve happiness right? This is where I thought I had an answer, because I remember the feeling of joy everytime I am able to prove my hypothesis at research work. And man! that feeling is powerful! A thought that emerged in your head is now better than thoughts that have previously emerged in other heads!? And hence, I started chasing this feeling of joy, because, of course, if I am able to do this, I feel feel joy right? And this happiness will finally hit my brain? And then I can feel good! Right?
Well, turns out that conditional approaches have an obvious problem. Because now, I need to make sure that my condition of obtaining results in my work was satisfied before I chose to feel joy. So, I pursued this goal, postponing the feeling of joy for whenever I deserve feeling it.
6 months of joy-less days pass and I am now wondering - what is all this worth? Is the eventual happiness going to be so great? Will I be able to re-capture my 6 months of non-joy? And, by the way, this approach also has another inevitable flaw - which in retrospective is something I am grateful for. Productivity. Trying to get work done when you are not choosing to be happy is just a whole crapshoot of mind-fog. So, while I got a lot of work done, I still wasn’t able to prove my hypothesis and by manner of my own choice, I felt the constant lack of joy. Ok - as a cautionary to being melodramatic, I will add that - here, I speak about happiness as a global function. Happiness (to me) is a hierarchial feeling. One that exists in fleeting moments, in phases and, in days. The fleeting feeling is often created, as a matter of circumstance. You turn up at a lunch table where the topic shifts towards something you relate to, you feel the little sparks of joy in your brain-thingy. You choose to play tennis one evening - you meet friends (who are all equally frustrated - albeit by corporate jobs) and you hit yellow fuzzy balls - tada! 2 hours worth of sparky sparks. And the eventual global state of happiness - consider this the answer to “Are you happy?” asked to you randomly, during multiple trials and aggregated. An interesting observation is that as you move from local states of joy to more long-form settings, the proactive-choice you need to make just becomes that much more essential. Which leads me to this - recognising that happiness is just another choice you can take - every day, every moment, every way possible. Choose it. For yourself. For people around you. You can be happy when you are overwhelmed, you can be happy when nothing goes right on the day. And you can be happy, when you face moments of sadness - perhaps in the way of recognising that there is more happiness to look forward to than the sadness you currently feel. Because - afterall - what is the point of being sad no?
