Recipe for Happiness

All of us are humans, we are all enmeshed in a world full of opposites – pleasure & pain, joy & sorrow, profit & loss, victory & defeat, success & failure, birth & death. We work and sweat and plot and plan and spend all our time trying to achieve one side of each pair of opposites – pleasure, joy, profit, victory, success – while avoiding the other – pain, sorrow, loss, defeat, failure.

But here’s the thing – both sides are really not at all that different from each other. What’s more, one cannot exist without the other. You cannot avoid the bad side of the equation because rejecting the bad side means denying the good side as well. You don’t feel even half much of pleasure of achieving something if you have never failed in the process. More importantly, neither side ever lasts – not pleasure, not pain, not victory, not defeat.

So what should you do? Accept both sides of each pair of opposite with the same sunny attitude. And there is another way of achieving the same result – rejecting both sides of each pair of opposites! Whichever one you pick, it means the same thing – you neither get elated when something “good” happens nor depressed when something “bad” happens. You are always calm. And calm means no fear (of failure), no desire (for victory), no sorrow (over loss) and no anger (at rejection).

Isn’t it very hard to accept or reject every pair of opposite, especially since our entire world is made up of them? You bet it is. But one simple way to start on the long journey is to stay completely focused on the work at hand, whatever that work may be – studying for exam, helping your parents around the house, taking care of cranky grandparents, researching a science project with team-mates you don’t go along with…… Don’t think about how disagreeable the work is, don’t wonder what the point of it is, and don’t worry about whether it will bring you any rewards, that you hope, or the failures or dread. Instead put your head down and JUST DO IT.

Eventually, the work itself will become the purpose, and you will not care about the results. The work itself will become the reward, and you will stop looking outside it for rewards.

On the surface, it may seem like a recipe for a dull life, but those who have tried it swear it is actually a recipe for perfect and lasting happiness.

If the Gita’s philosophy were reduced to one sholka……

It would be Shloka 47 of the second chapter of the Gita

You only have the right to perform your duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself as the cause of the results of your activities and do not attach to inactions.