The secret to being happy all year

Learning to make a year a truly happy one!

No year is good or bad, it’s just a happy one!

Life’s upheavals and scars, interestingly, make it beautiful, meaningful.

Last evening, I sat alone with my coffee at Starbucks. And I thought back on the year gone by.

It’s been an interesting one surely.

My dad passed on in April. It has been a new, unique, often reflectively painful, experience living without him. In May, our daughter Aanchal graduated in her Master’s program – thanks to two angels who sponsored her. Even so, she and our son, Aashirwad, have had to deal with their own share of challenges. Watching them deal stoically with these Life-defining experiences definitely made Vaani and me proud. But there were spells of agony too – arising from our inability to help them as parents; at all such times, we took refuge in prayer. Nalli’s Kuppuswami Chetti came forward serendipitously, voluntarily, miraculously, to publish the Tamizh translation of my book Fall Like A Rose Petal – and so, Uthirum Roja Ithazh Pola launched in October. Our 100^th non-commercial Conversation, as the happynesswalas – Inspiring ‘Happyness’, happened in April. And the 50^th Edition of our popular, longest-running, non-commercial, Conversation Series, #BlissCatchers, was hosted in August.

Although we awoke each day with renewed vigor to reinvest ourselves in the task of turning around our business and repaying our over 170 creditors, we have been pushed back by Life. One more time. Another year has passed without a steady or serious revenue opportunity. The glimmer of hope that came between end-2017 and mid-2018 evaporated this year, plunging us into yet another phase of worklessness; leaving us to survive on grace and grants. So, as we enter 2020, we continue to endure our bankruptcy – and all its material, emotional and legal challenges – into its 13^th year now!

Both Vaani and I are over 50 now. So, understandably, some persistent health issues certainly raised alarms all through 2019. They pointed to what could be potentially debilitating conditions, but without the means to immediately deal with them, we have left them where they are – for Life to heal, to take care!

As I thought deeply, I felt 2019 offered itself for review on two counts.

1. This was yet another tumultuous year, one that was often punishing. Given that we have already been faced with a grave challenge for over a decade now, on whether we deserved a year like 2019, we could possibly label it as bad or as ugly. Well, it certainly was not a good one on that scale!!!
2. A constant theme for Vaani and me, that was evident all through 2019, is Happiness! Clearly, Happiness has held us together and helped us endure and survive. Our ability to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering – which is, essentially, being happy despite our circumstances – shone through the year, through one more year!

I quickly dropped the first count. And as I embraced the second one, I smiled to myself – in gratitude, in prayer, in surrender. I thanked Life for reiterating a lesson that we have learnt and known only too well over this past decade. Which is, no year is good or bad. It’s just a happy one!

You see, a year is, at one level, a simple measure of time that we humans invented. It denotes approximately 365.256 Earth cycles around the Sun. Good, bad, ugly – well, these are human labels, again human inventions! Something happens that meets or exceeds your expectations – you label it as good. Something that you don’t want happens to you and you call it bad. And if that something causes you acute trauma, makes Life unbearable, you call it ugly. Such is the human response to Life events. And a year gets labeled based on how you, as a human, have chosen to evaluate the events that occurred in your Life, based on your expectations! But although their actions deliver this unit of time called a year, the Sun and the Earth are not bothered about how – and what – we mortals think. Hafez, the 14th Century Persian poet, says this so beautifully: “Even after all this time, the Sun never says to the Earth, ‘You owe me’. Look what happens with a love like that, it lights up the whole sky.” Now, this is how Nature operates: without any concept of time or of profit or loss. The Sun simply, unconditionally, without judgment, lights up Life on the planet – it lights up our lives – even as the Earth keeps going around the Sun! There’s love, there’s abundance, there’s a selfless giving in both these acts. Therefore, there is no worry, there is no frustration, there is no suffering in how Nature works. There’s a pure, unadulterated, sense of just being – a.k.a Happiness!

Which is why a year can really, truly, be filled with Happiness! No matter what you are faced with, if you don’t complicate your Life with human ideas – if you don’t bring up your expectations, if you don’t analyze what you want and what you deserve and instead humbly accept what you are given – you will be happy!

Yes, as is with the process of Life, at every step, you will face upheavals. Just as you will be blessed with grace.

…~ You may find and follow your Bliss. People you know will die or leave you. There may be times when you will deal with material loss or there will be others when you have to cope with heartbreaks. You may not get what you want – someone else may get it though; and you will feel frustrated and suffer when you compare yourself with them! Your Life’s Purpose may find you. Some of the challenges you are dealing with may leave you numb. You may want answers to your questions or seek logic and reason that can explain whatever’s happening but you may end up being more frustrated with Life’s inscrutability. You may find love. A child may arrive in the family. The government you voted for with so much hope may let you down – horribly! You may win a jackpot. Or a dreaded health condition may not be what you have. Towards the end of the year, you may realize that your resolution to lose weight may have dissolved long, long ago, because the pangs of earning-a-living held you in their vice-like grip.~…

So, all these, and other, scenarios may well play out through the year. And such is the process of Life! To be happy you must simply trust this process. You must celebrate the suchness of Life. You must go with its flow.

In Japanese culture, there is this ancient art called kintsugi. It is the art of fixing broken pottery with golden lacquer. As a philosophy, kintsugi invites us to celebrate imperfections. It reminds us that what happens to an object, including its breakage and repair, is an integral part of its history. Which is so true of your journey through Life too. Every experience that you go through is part of the process of the unfolding of your myth. If you sit back and reflect on your own 2019, on how Life dealt with you this year, you will see how every upheaval, every scar in your Life, is precious in its own way. You will realize how you have emerged stronger and wiser from each experience you have been through. You will be amazed at how you have learnt to cope, how you have moved on this year too, just as you have done, all your Life.

This is why it is pointless to label a year as good or bad (or ugly). A set of events simply happened to you this past year. And another set will happen in the year coming up. Instead of over-analyzing and labeling the year gone by, embrace what is, and train your mind to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering. This holds the key to your Happiness. This is the way a “Happy New Year” stays true to its meaning and you stay happy through those 365.256 times that the Earth circles the Sun!

Note: AVIS and Vaani are the happynesswalas. They believe their Life’s Purpose is Inspiring ‘Happyness’! They are going through a fascinating Life-changing experience – a crippling bankruptcy!! Look them up here: www.avisviswanathan.in and www.avinitiatives.co.in.

The NY resolution that will not dissolve and disappear

Just live each day fully, make it memorable!

A manager asked me, after a Help Yourself To Happiness Talk I delivered on Friday, why New Year resolutions are often never followed through. I feel resolutions stop making sense because we attach too much importance to the time of the year than to what we resolve to do. So, when the sheen of the New Year wears away, the resolutions too dissolve, they disappear.

Now, I don’t believe in resolutions around the turn of the calendar year. I feel that New Year as a concept is over-rated, over-marketed and is, in several ways, exaggerated. Yes, I partied hard last night. But I didn’t party because it was New Year’s – I party every day. Some days, I drink and dance. On others, I simply am. I celebrate Life in all its manifestations. So, every day is a party. And each moment is a celebration.

I believe totally in management thinker Noel Tichy’s definition of leadership. He says, “Leadership is the ability to see reality and mobilize the appropriate response!” Now, consider the most evident reality of our Life – it is impermanent, it is a limited-period offer, we are all speeding towards our death and our Life will be over soon. So, what is the most appropriate response that we must bring to the table? We must live fully, not just exist, we must be happy and we must make each day count! This is what personal leadership is all about. Making each day count means doing what we love doing each day, so that the day becomes unputdownable and remains memorable.

Try this simple exercise. Take your age and multiply it with 365. That’s the number of days you have been on this planet. How many of those days do you remember? How many have been memorable? How many have been unputdownable? If you have started counting, you have lost the game of Life! Because the idea of this lifetime being handed to you as a gift is for you to enjoy living, to celebrate yourself, to be happy. It is not to merely earn a living and suffer just because you have problems in your Life.

Clearly, you can’t undo the past. But from today on, from this very moment, you can resolve to make each day count. Go on, just do that! And watch how the rest of your Life is filled with ‘Happyness’ every single day!

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Make this a Happywala New Year!

Flow with your Life to experience the abundance and grace in it!

We had a meaningful New Year’s Eve. A few of us friends had got together. Through the evening, as the best of R D Burman and Kishore Kumar songs were played, and sung, we also had an interesting activity on. Everyone got a word from Santa’s big red bag that was passed around. Each person had to talk about the word in the context of the year gone by and what they hoped for in 2016 in relation to what the word meant to them!

So words like ‘Celebrate’, ‘Miracle’, ‘Serendipity’, ‘Awesome’, ‘Magic’, ‘Learn’, ‘Unlearn’, ‘Inspire’, ‘Happiness’, ‘Love’, ‘Be Yourself’, ‘Poetry’ and ‘Let Go!’ popped out of Santa’s bag! Most people who spoke related beautifully to their words, pausing to reflect on what the word had meant to them in 2015. Someone shared how the year had been full of celebrations all through! Another spoke of being awesome and celebrating awesomeness. The gentleman who got the word magic asked us to consider the magic in the moment when the year changed! Another talked about how spending time with his father, before he passed on, was an opportunity to re-experience unconditional love. Vaani talked about her inspiration that led her to resume learning music in 2015. And there was this friend, who did not exactly know what serendipity meant but realized upon reflection that everything in our lives is, uncannily, serendipitous.

The word I got was, interestingly, aptly, happiness. To me happiness is not just a state of mind or an attitude, it is a state of being. Over the last few years this state of being has helped us as a family face – and survive – what can be described as, to put it matter-of-factly, a cathartic phase in our Life. To be sure, we continue to grapple with imponderables. But we have learnt the art of being happy despitethe circumstances.

Being happy does not guarantee that your problems will disappear. Or that solutions to your problems will immediately appear. Being happy, we have discovered, has simply helped us feel and experience the abundance and grace that surrounds us. When you are happy, you magically see only what is – and don’t get stuck only complaining about what you don’t have. So, as we enter yet another year when our financially uncertain situation endures, we celebrate that we all have good health, we have a home to come back to, we have each other and that we have friends who treat us with love, compassion and dignity. Through this celebration, we recognize the grace that fills our lives, always giving us all that we need!

Really, it is not what happiness is. It is what happiness does. It makes you live a fuller Life, no matter what’s happening to you!  What comes between you and your happiness is you. You are unhappy only because you are trying to control what’s happening to you. When you try to control Life, you are not in it. You are looking at Life as if it were a problem that you have to solve. As if it is a third party that you have to deal with. Instead if you flow with Life, you will find that it is filled with abundance and grace every step of the way and you too will, as one of our friends last night exclaimed as the clock struck 12, have a Happywala 2016!

Being depressed for too long is an unevolved response to Life

If you are feeling depressed about Life please know that you are experiencing something normal. Just don’t allow the depression to pin you down and hold you hostage.

Recent media reports suggest that Bollywood star Deepika Padukone has talked about battling anxiety and depression last year. She reportedly felt a ‘strange emptiness’ in her Life and her close friend’s suicide only made matters worse for her. Deepika has said she shot for much of the climax for Happy New Year (2014, Farah Khan) feeling “this way”. Now, this confession by the actor may make some people wonder why she, of all people, has to be depressed. After all, doesn’t she have it all – a glamorous Life, success, money, a fairy-tale relationship with a co-star and what not? But that’s the way depression is – it strikes different people for different reasons. Even so the fundamental cause why people tend to feel depressed is the same – they are depressed when they don’t get what they want. Since people’s wants vary, the reasons for depression vary too. But since everyone out there has unfulfilled wants, depression is inevitable at some time in Life or the other in everyone’s Life.

The way to deal with depression is simple though. First accept that depression is a normal and natural response to not getting what you want in Life. Sometimes your wants may be well defined – money, a car, a vacation, a relationship, a child…whatever. Sometimes your wants may be tangible; you may have all the material wealth but what you may be looking for is something intangible – better understanding from family, inner peace, joy in the work you are doing and such. In either case, know that most often you will not get what you want in Life. So, feeling depressed over a want not being met, or granted, is a juvenile, unevolved response to Life. Now if you learn that the nature of Life is such that all your needs will be fulfilled, but never your wants, then you can rise above your depressed state and move on. But if you allow yourself to be depressed for too long, then suffering isn’t far away. Because depression is like a wave. If you stand there too long, you will be drowned by the high tide. Then depression will hold you hostage. This when you will not find motivation to do anything – to face people, to go to work, to believe in yourself or even to just be alone – by yourself. You will become irritable, you will grieve and you will suffer.

The first wave of depression is natural. But the second one is self-inflicted. You can’t avoid the first one. But you can ensure that you keep the second one away. Be wary of depression. For every second in your Life that you are depressed, you are not living. You are merely existing! A simple truth worth remembering when depression strikes you is that if you are not getting what you want, then perhaps, it is the way it is meant you be. Instead, simply, accept what is and go on with your Life.