4 questions that lead you to a lifetime of happiness!

Only you can decide what makes you happy!

We bumped into a young friend at a coffee shop yesterday. She is a qualified architect but is taking a gap year in her academics.

She asked us: “Is it okay to not feel like doing anything in Life? I mean, is it seriously okay? I feel everyone around me is chasing their tail and here I am…completely clueless about my future and blundering along…I am still unsure if I want to study further or if I want to practice or be a writer or just travel the world. Everyone is forcing me to decide and go do ‘something’. But I don’t want to commit to doing something that my heart isn’t agreeing to.”

Vaani, in turn, asked her this question: “What makes you happy?”

And the young lady replied: “I am still figuring out what makes me happy. But I am sure none of the things my family or friends want me to do, like do a desk job to earn an income and gain experience, or a do a Masters Program so that the tag of a graduate can be acquired, will make me happy.”

The lady, in our opinion, has her priorities clearly in place.

Even as she is figuring out what will quench her soul, what will make her intrinsically happy, she’s sure about what she does not want to do. And there’s no confusion in her mind there. Now, that’s a wonderful state to be in.

You see, the whole world is running amuck – everyone is trying to become something, become someone else that they really are not. Worse, almost everyone else seems to have an opinion about what you must do and how you must live your Life. Sometimes, this cacophony can be deafening. If you capitulate and sign up for what the world wants you to do, at the cost of your own inner peace and joy, then don’t complain about your Life being listless and meaningless. Because that’s really what Life will be when you live it for someone else’s sake! But, if you want your Life to be exciting, if you want to wake up each morning loving the opportunity to go do what you love doing, then you have to pause and reflect.

Ask yourself important, fundamental, questions: 1. What makes me happy? 2. What makes me feel grateful for this gift called Life? 3. Doing what makes me lose myself completely so that I forget all my worries and even lose track of time? 4. What do I want to keep doing again and again and again – all my Life?

Well, you know what you answered for those four questions. Now, just go do it. Simple. And if figuring this out takes a year or two, or even more, well, so be it.

Life is a precious, one-time, limited-period offer. The most intelligent way to live it is to only do what makes you happy. And no one but you can make that choice – only you can decide what makes you happy. When you do live a Life, doing what you love, everything you need arrives in your Life – at its own time and pace. If there ever is a secret to living a Life of happiness and contentment – this, absolutely, is it!

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Why an ‘Everything Desk’ doesn’t work in Life

In today’s Vlog, I share how we can deal with a Life where we won’t always get what we want!

View time: 2:13 minutes

 

Contentment arrives when the past does not matter and the future is irrelevant

You have to train your mind for you to learn to be content with the Life that you have.

Yesterday, I met a man who, after hearing my Fall Like A Rose Petal  Talk, came up to me and said that he was very ‘lucky’. He had, according to his own submission, a lot of money, a loving family and all the comforts that he wanted in Life. Yet, he confessed, he was not happy: “I am very insecure. I feel I will lose all my money and all the people I love, I fear, they will die one day. I am never peaceful with myself.” He wanted to know what he should do.

I told him that he was right on both counts – that money and Life are impermanent. So, the only way to enjoy the money he has is to spend it wisely on himself and on the people he loves; and, if he is inclined, to use some of the money he has to make our world a better place. And the only way to enjoy the company of those people he loved, is to stop fearing their inevitable death but to live with them happily for as long as he can.

I am not sure how much he may have internalized my simple, unequivocal perspective. But his quest for inner peace offers us an important learning too.

Lack of contentment arises from the inability to rein in the mind. You are not content with the Life you have – whatever it may be, the way it is – because your mind is not in your control. In fact, only when the mind is controlling you do you live in the dead past or in the unborn future. In the past, you are clinging on to anger, grief, guilt over what has happened, what is over. In the future, which has not yet arrived, you are cooking up scenarios that don’t exist, fearing, imagining, worrying, being forever anxious and stressed out. Unless you seize control of your mind, and train it through a meditative practice, to live in the present moment, to live from moment to moment, you cannot be content with your Life.

Osho, the Master, explains it so simply, so powerfully, so beautifully: “To be contented means…don’t expect anything from Life, just live it moment to moment, and whatsoever it gives is just fantastic. Life goes on pouring infinite treasures on us. And because of this mind asking for more, we remain blind to those treasures. Once this constant noise for more stops, then this chirping of the bird is enough. There is nothing in it and there is all in it.”

When you start your journey seeking contentment you will first struggle with it. You will fall. But the key is to get up, dust yourself and keep walking. When you experience contentment for the first time it will blow you away. You will want more of it. Then nothing in Life will affect you anymore – you will not be swayed by pleasure and you will not be held hostage by pain. All you will want is for that “feeling” of contentment to be perpetual. And you will do whatever it takes to continue to experience it. This is the way to inner peace – when the past does not matter, when the future is irrelevant. What matters is that you are here, now, happy and content, with what is!