For all unhappy women - how to be happy in spite of everything - Step 5

Gaining Speed
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In this series of do-it-yourself happiness quest, this is step 5. Step 1 was Discovery, Step 2 the Importance, Step 3 the Dive into the meaning and need for happiness and Step 4 the beginning of the journey. Having begun the quest, it is time now to do it better and faster.

The small something that I identified after step 4, turned out, surprisingly, to be something I had always wanted to do, but had never found time for. I had always wanted to be able to play the keyboard - maybe not at a professional level, but well enough to play for my friends at a gathering. So I started playing a song on the computer and trying to play it on the keyboard.

It was a frustrating exercise - I was about 47 years of age and my fingers were pretty stiff. Without formal training, learning the correct technique was a struggle. I needed a week to master one line or rhythm cycle - a very slow process indeed. I spend a couple of hours practicing everyday but never reached my goal of playing well enough to play for my friends. But each note I played - well or badly, it just didn't matter - lifted me up. It made me happy - even on days when I could not find the time to practice. The memory still lifts me two years down the line.

In the first blog of this series, the one I think of as the Discovery phase, I had come to the conclusion that one of the criteria for judging whether something gives us happiness or just pleasure was to check whether the feeling is long lasting or not. I discovered that this one thing that I was doing for myself did really fall in that category! And the best thing was that it did not impinge on my responsibilities at all. All I needed was to rearrange my schedule a little, and work a little faster on my duties so that I could generate a little free time.

Since then, I have done other things like participating in the Shiamak Davar summer fest - a five week dance camp with hour long classes three days a week, and started working out - gym / aerobics / yoga. All these create a sense of well being that is very close to the feeling of happiness. This, then, follows the path described in Step 4 - the beginning of the journey to happiness. And with each step, the reservoir of happiness seems to fill up faster and faster.

Each person will have such small things that generate a lasting good feeling in them. And once you have identified them as described in Step 4, the quest for happiness settles firmly within our court in this game of life - it is no longer an unattainable goal. As you begin pursuing these bits, you will find that your enthusiasm for other things rises too. Dreaded chores become just small items in our daily life. Hurtful comments / events seem to hurt less. Painful situations seem to be easier to bear. Life on the whole seems a lot less of a burden than it was before. As a side benefit, these are really big ones....

The situation might not change, the people around us might not either and what made us unhappy in the first place might still be as big as ever. But as we fill our happiness reservoir, all these things effect us lesser and lesser. Oh! they do hurt still, but the hurt is no longer debilitating. They still prick at our psyche but we are able to get over them faster.

As we start identifying what makes us happy, we discover that slowly more and more things make us happy. We find new ways to be happy. And slowly, we start finding more and more to be happy about. We start finding happiness in things outside ourselves too.

And when this happens, we can be sure that we have mastered the art of being happy. From struggling to identify one small thing that creates happiness in us, we graduate to finding happiness in things as they are. We stop expecting happiness to be a 'high', a 'thrill' and start connecting to the low level thrum of contentment.

Is this, then, the end of the journey? Do we stop here?

No, of course not! Life is not static - it doesn't let us sit still. New situations and people arrive. Relationships emerge, evolve and develop. They all bring with them the prospect of new emotions, new achievements, new failures and a possibility of spiraling into unhappiness again. The lessons we have learned on this trip will need revisiting, updating.....

So that brings me to the topic of the next, and probably last, post in this series. How to utilize this reservoir of happiness we created to help us cope with situations in the future...... but that is yet to be written