Being happy is a habit too!

It has been a long time since I wrote in the blog last. I think, You stop doing it for sometime, then you lose the habit. That is it! I can blame it on the habit as the true culprit! Like they say "Old habits die hard", may be "New habits die easy"!!! It is all in the habits that we imbibe, as we evolve in our life.

I was thinking the other day as to what makes us happy. I was not sure. Is it what we do? Is it what we accomplish? Is it how we live? Is it what we eat? Is it what we see? Is it what we hear? So many questions that have no answers. May be all of them together.

Then it dawned on me that being happy and feeling good about your life is a habit too! Just like we do physical exercises for being healthy. But we reap the benefits only when we are consistent. This can only be done when we are persistent and persevere. We need to motivate ourselves into doing this over a period of time. What we are doing here is to train our body to get into a better physical shape. Similarly may be we can train our minds to be happy most of the time, if not all the time. Happiness is in enjoying what you do or don't. Most of the times we feel bad that we are not doing this and that. Why is it that we always to look at things "half empty" and not "half full". For the last holidays we did not go out of California for the first time in many years and really relaxed for 2 full weeks. You can look at this and say we wasted our time by not going anywhere. Why do we have this mindset, that we should be happy only when we do something and not happy when we don't do anything at time. I thought it was relaxing not going out anywhere and just lazing around. I think we should be able to enjoy the inactivity which we indulge in sometimes and not feel guilty. Earlier I used to feel bad that I was not waking up early enough. Then one of my colleague-friends suggested that, may be I should just take it for what it is and be cool.

My father used to say " a healthy body and a healthy mind". I think there is some element of truth in that. Like we train our body, we can train our mind too.

I read somewhere when we base our happiness on some accomplishment we can never be happy. We work hard to achieve something and then we feel happy. But after that event we look to achieve something else and wait for that event to be happy again. This goes on and on till the end. There are moments of happiness when you get something, interspersed with the struggles and frustrations in the periods in between. Why can't we just live the life being content and happy with what we have? We can, but then someone says, "when you are content and happy, then you will not progress in life". I do not for a moment believe, that "no one can be successful if he/she is happy and contented". I believe that you can compartmentalize, where you can be successful and also live a happy and contented life.