Success is not the Key to Happiness

“Becoming successful in life!!!  What’s it, dad?” The little girl asks him while gazing at the book he is reading. The caption screams ‘Success’.

“To become a successful means winning in the game of life.” he answers without taking away his eyes from the book. The sea breeze that comes stealthily through the window blinds refresh the father and daughter duo.

“How to get success in life,” the girl persists. “Is god out there evaluating our life and giving us the trophy of success?” Her innocent face and tender look betray the question she puts forth. A question that puzzles a young, curious mind for an answer.

“That’s not the way one gets bestowed with success,” the dad answers after putting down the book. He is a bit proud realizing how smart his daughter is. He is silent for a while, organizing his thoughts to give a coherent answer to the girl.

“To become successful in life means earning big money,” he speaks emphatically. “It’s getting educated like your dad; employed in an MNC and earning fat salary pockets. Or starting a business and pocketing big chunks of money. If you thus earn a fortune, you can own a palatial dwelling and live with all comforts of life. Money is yummier than the manna of the heaven.” The dad laughs at his own joke and looks intently at the girl’s face if she is convinced of what he said.

“Wow,” the girl shouts, but looks like she is still brooding over something.

“Aside from money, people try to become popular in the society,” the dad continues with a flourish. “Yes, I mean stars like Rajinikanth Kamal Hassan and Amitabh Bachchan get admired and liked by the fellow humans. Winning in politics too makes a man call himself successful in life. Popularity thus becomes a ladder one can climb to rake in fabulous money.

“Now, I know what you mean by getting success in life, dad.” The girl smiles. “People can do anything they like,” she pauses for a moment and continues. “But their aim should be to get money, as much as possible. And that way they can boast they are successful in life. Isn’t it, dad?”

“Yes, honey,” he responds. He is happy of having convinced his daughter.

The small girl goes into a contemplation, closing her beady eyes. She revels in silence for a while and then speaks:

“Dad, if becoming successful in life depends on the money you earn or the popularity one enjoys, why then the uncle next door committed suicide last week? You told me he was a millionaire swimming in currency notes and a popular business magnet too. So even after earning huge money and popularity, why he felt he was not successful in life. There might be something in life his wealth or popularity could not buy.”

He gets puzzled. His daughter’s question nails him and he has no answer to it. He finds a chink in what he told her about getting success in life. His self-compliment about his power of convincing now gets a beating and leaves him disoriented. He stands frozen, gazing at the girl helplessly.

A bit of introspection on our part will also make us feel like the bewildered dad.

Like the proverbial blind identifying an elephant, we think success lies in our going up in the career graph and thus getting helluva money. Or in overtaking our rivals in a business and getting a fortune.

If flourishing in wealth means success, why the rich aren’t happy in life? As the little girl said why the wealthy find life a square in a circle and commit suicide. If winning in life is getting public glare why the celluloid stars hate life and take to a noose. Politicians, too, who stockpile money on the sly go to temples after temples and meet saints and astrologers just to get to know about their future. They aren’t contented with what they have. They want to go through the sky and grab the moon.

What then is success? And what clicks success in life?

As we know, success is neither being wealthy nor popular. It’s the voice of a happy mind which says happiness is not out there in life but it’s in you. A treasure it may appear elusive, but one can have it if one tries honestly.  Peace and tranquility that brings happiness in one’s heart needn’t be born attributes, you may acquire them by constant practice and training.

Just think for a moment.

Why we slog away at a job and earn bucks… more bucks?

Isn’t it about buying a posh bungalow, leading a comfortable life and thus getting a happy mindset?

Like rivers turning their course towards the ocean at the end of their journey, we, too, to get a contented and happy mind, try to give ourselves all the comforts of life. But our minds deny being cheerful no matter how much money we squeeze out of our job/business or the popularity we assiduously build.

When all said and done, we aren’t blessed with contended minds or minds that stay soaked in happiness forever. One may get such mindsets when one does things with fulfilled sense and competently. Or when one avoids doing them by halves. Success is simple: it’s doing right things in a right way at the right time.

Yeah, that is called success doing things with perfection and thus evolving a joyous and happy mind from it.

Inputs source: Tamil Kumudam Snehidhi

Images credit: Google

I have dreams both beautiful and bizarre

“Dreams are not those which come while we are sleeping, but dreams are those when you don’t sleep before fulfilling them” – Abdul Kalam

I always love to flirt with dreams. And I don’t grade them big or small. My thoughts and perceptions about them go well with dictionaries that say ‘dreams are the manifestations of one’s pent up feelings, desires, images and sensations, occurring during sleep’. Hence, a dream is a thing relating to human mind and not body.’ A matter of mind’, I would say. Though a dream is a matter or vision you experience in an unconscious state of mind, it still piggybacks you the rest of your life, make you reshape it in such a fashion to get what you aspire for.

“I saw my mom in my dream the night before,” said my friend, one evening, when we were in a restaurant sipping degree coffee. ‘She didn’t seem to age. She was like the same when I last saw her in my teens”, added my friend, his eyes moved to tears. Not a worldly person, my friend was always impassive and flat – a big stone sans emotions. But, now his dream made him euphoric as the old sweet memories of his mom seemed overtake him. ‘That’s another dimension of dreams; they paint human lives with tasteful colors,’ I told my friend who nodded his head in the affirmative. A dream has the power of adding luster to a man’s life, if he is emotional or stoic, give him wings and make him fly to the land of his fantasies.

There are still persons who say, with pride, that they don’t get dreams. They even compliment them for not living in a make believe world. I only pity those rough-hewn, passionless minds. I would call them uncharged gizmos no matter how elegantly they look and work smartly. That the odds men face in lives give them only those skills necessary for living and shut all his dreams and fantasies cannot be accepted. For, dreams represent what people see, hear, experience and wish. No man can latch his mind to avoid getting dreams. We’d better remember that dreams aren’t our errand boys but masters.

Though, to a section of humanity, dreams are superficial things – a bundle of mysteries – they still become integral part of one’s life. They are significant as they aren’t biased. Both the rich and the poor, the king and the slave can catch up with their dreams and stretch them the way they like. A dream is like a movie where you, a decrepit citizen, watch yourself swapping position with a monarch. The only tool a dream needs is a mind: a mind capable of dreaming, a mind capable of sustaining a swirl of fantasies.

 So many are the hurdles of life that it always become impossible for you to get what you desire. You often begin to hunt an elephant, but end up trapping only a mouse. The wounds your psyche thus receive from life gets healed by dreams. They, for example, make a physical wreck become a world champion in a hurdle race; a decrepit writer, thus find himself getting a Noble Prize for his writings – though they’re pedestrian; and an adolescent boy, to his excitement, sees himself flirting with a dream girl of his choice. That’s the effects of the dreams, they metamorphose men and women what they aren’t in true life.

There were times man could not deduce reasons why he had dreams.  Long research, after much sweat, found REM [rapid eye moment] stage of sleep to be the cause of dreams. That’s right. But even assuming that you get your dreams during your REM, some dreams never allow you to sleep before you fulfill them. It happened to Napoleon and Gandhi. Moved by their dreams, both, one a warrior and the other a Karma Yogi, went sleepless until they made their visions come true. But, wait. If you want to have the hang of a dream, it needs to be a quality one -- worthy of pursuing.

People all over the world invest their best mettle and achieve something remarkable in many fields, but attribute the reasons for their feats to dreams. Pitifully, we still have persons in our midst who evince interest only in getting their dreams interpreted than working to make their visions come true. This happens because we lack courage; don’t have the fire to follow our dreams. People, with indomitable courage and grit, don’t let their dreams go past them or let anyone stop them from having them as goals. To them, dreams are treasure troves, and, to follow them and fulfill them, they would forgo food, sleep and all the comforts of life. Like the sun rotating with the earth, they rotate with their visions.

Since ‘dream is a wish your heart make’, believe it, work for it and make it come true. To honor your dreams that show you a rosy way, you could make them a ladder, climb it and reach out to the higher rungs of life.

No Time to Stand and Stare

[Lay back on the garden of leisure/hold on to the new-find pleasure/let go off the oppressive stress/ hands and legs you may stretch/switch off the mind/off load your worries/let happiness bloom around you???

My composition abruptly stopped. The adamant pen, giggling at my verbose, refused to move further on the A4 sheet. Hmmm, even a pen knows about a grain form the chaff; knows the worth of a write better than the writer. Thus my attempt to write a prescription for how to live on and how to sing a song of peace through a poem ended in a fiasco. However, W.H. Davies came to my rescue. His poem ‘Leisure’, which I present here, reflects my thoughts of how to walk through the debris of the modern life. Amen.]

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Image courtesy: Google