Happiness and life cannot be defined for a group or for an individual; no one has the same view about what happiness and life is. But for me life and happiness are a chemical reaction in my brain, it is what I do, and experience which makes me happy. The sum of these experiences and positive reaction defines happiness and life to me. Happiness is not something we have in our hands; it is something we carry in our hearts. It doesn't depend upon who we are or what we have; it depends solely upon what we think and achieved form our life.
I have seen many people’s spending a life time searching for happiness, they chase idle dreams, addictions, religions and even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plague them. But the irony is that the only place they ever needed to search was within themselves.
In order to learn more about life and happiness, I explored through the life and views of many people, but suddenly my eye caught the article about the life of Arthur Ashe, the legendary Wimbledon player who was dying of AIDS which he got due to infected blood he received during a heart surgery in 1983.
From world over, he received letters from his fans, one of which conveyed: "Why does GOD have to select you for such a bad disease"?
To this Arthur Ashe replied: "The world over -- 50 million children start playing tennis, 5 million
learn to play tennis, 500,000 learn professional tennis, 50,000 come to the circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach Wimbledon, 4 to semifinal, 2 to the finals, when I was holding a cup I never asked GOD 'Why me?'.And today in pain I should not be asking GOD 'Why me?' "
This stuck in my mind and made me think about my life too.
I was born in middle class family in small town Dhulikhel. My father and mother used to struggle to fulfill our basics needs. The life was not so convenient and of high standard but I get proper education, shelter and food. I was greatly satisfied and happy with my life. But as the time went ticking and days went passing, I got an opportunity to study here in Japan missing all my childhood, birth place and family. At first it was difficult to adjust here in Japan, new faces, new culture…, but as the time went by I started to adopt myself in this new alien environment of Japan. After all my six years of being here in Japan I learnt many things about life and happiness. Life is not just holding good cards but rather in playing well with those cards we hold.
The life here is more convenient, easy going and of high standard. But still I find myself lost, but one thing I came to understand is that convenient life and satisfactory life are far different things. Though I had not much enough there in Nepal I was satisfied and happy, but here I have everything but still I am not happy because I miss my homeland and my family. I came to realize that it’s not how much we have but how much we enjoy, that’s makes happiness.
Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are and we enjoy in our life.
Life and happiness is difficult to sum up in these few words because it is as vast as we can imagine and as deep as we can think.
But one thing is sure the happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. The world in which