A child in Kathmandu pulling against my rope as his friend looks on in amusement.
A series of minor (mostly academic) niggling setbacks have left me reeling in uncertainty lately. I pondered on the issue of happiness again. Is it merely the satisfaction of whatever rational or irrational wishes we might have? A joy that does not contradict with penalty or guilt? What is an important ingredient of the good life, the happy life?
Well, I have been reading "The Geography of Bliss", a book about one grump's search for the definition of happiness by travelling to some of the world's most happiest places..and this is an except I would really like to share.
"It is a about a temple I visited in Japan. It was a very old and beautiful temple. More than 1000 years old, my guide told me. How remarkable, I thought. I have never seen such an old strcuture so perfectly preserved. The wood had hardly any splinters, and not a log of wood was out of place. I read a plague mounted on a small stand in front of the temple and sure enough, the temple was build in the 700s. But then, I noticed a few more words, in smaller print. "Temple rebult in 1971."
What was going on? Were the Japanese trying to pull a fast one on unsuspecting tourists, pretending the temple was 1200 years old when in fact it was fewer than 40 years old? Not exactly. In many Asian cultures, what matters is not the age of the physical structure but the spirit of the place. Temples in Japan are routinely destroyed and rebuilt, and yet people still consider them as old as the day they were first built.
This is not a semantic sleight of hand. It says a lot about a culture relates to its past. The essence of the original structyre remains, even if the physical structure does not. And while the Chinese may not venerate their old temples and houses, they do honor their dead. Ancestor worship is the Chinese way of staying connected to the past"
Are we really mere specks in the grand scheme of things?
Perhaps, an important ingredient in the good life, the happy life, is connecting to something larger than our physical selves. Perhaps, by recognizing that we are not mere blips on the cosmic radar screen (or a snowboarder, dwarfed by impeccable white expanse of snow) but part of something much larger. In the photograph above, the Nepali woman can see her unwavering love for her child as a blissful extension of her self; one that knows no boundaries. It's the mother-daughter connection that infuses meaning and fulfillment in her life.
This sentiment is also echoed by Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher. He concludes his book "The Conquest of Happiness" by describing a happy person thus: "Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joy that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those will come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest is to be found".
The author also said, "If we view our lives as merely the 70 or 80 years (if we are lucky!) we putter about on this planet, then they are indeed insignificant to the universe. But if our kinship is infinite, transcending generations, time and space, then...maybe we are, too.
Happiness Only Real When Shared - Alexander Supertramp, from Into The Wild (2007).
:)
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