13.6.07

Happiness Waves-02


1- Love Doers Role:
Going for what we love to do more than what we have to do, as much as possible and in a modest fashion will essentially increase the frequency of our happy waves, doing what we “have to” do give you sense of achievement and relief after you finish it, so it is wise sometimes not to neglect the essentials of these “have to do” list. Yet, despite this feeling of relief it never grant you a wave of happiness, so getting soaked in the “have to” staff will leave you as a non-guilty and unhappy person. You have to work-out your professional duties for example, but you still have to dedicate good portion of your life to practicing your hobbies and talents.

2- Today-Tomorrow Scale:
Balancing between today and tomorrow, if you sacrificed today for tomorrow, you will probably never live, because there will be always tomorrow until the last day of your life. And if you fulfilled today with happiness in a way that ruins tomorrow, you will not only loose the future, but also the worries you will get will surely ruin your present time. So, it is a balance of enjoying the moment and having a plan ahead.

3- Soul Windows:
Increasing moments of truth and absolute openness to the maximal tolerable limit. Lies and faking alters and damages the soul of the liar or malingerer first and before all. But, yes, we do all have certain degrees of fakeness in our lives, that is exactly why we need to practice complete openness and speak our minds and souls liberally with a person or group of persons in our lives.

4- Catch it Role:
Catch the moment of happiness when it comes, and try to keep it as much as possible, never waste it for an appointment if you can postpone it, or for a task you can do it later. Happiness is much more valuable, you can never put an alternative plan for happiness moments to be later, but you can do for most of other things…do not hesitate… Catch it once it glances.

5- Balling Role:
Send the ball of happiness around you, and wait for it, it will be back most of time, try to make others happy as much as you can, and if you cannot, try to avoid wounding them or harming them. If you spoke in a harsh tone to your assistant, next day when you step in your office, you will see a shadow in his eyes despite all the respect he still shows, this shadow of sorrow will alter your own happiness. And the opposite if you praised him for a good job, you will notice a shining eyes while stepping in that will help making your day. A branching role of the balling role is “Say it Role”. I wonder, why specifically in our culture, when a friend disappoints us we call him immediately and raise hill, while if he flattered us in a way or another we do not call immediately to say “Thank you dearest ever, you are the best”. Same applies to couples after a while, when doing good to each other is taken for grant and goes without thanking, while doing wrong staff is a start of a battle. Say as good words as you can to your world of persons as far as they deserve it. They know you like them and care for them, but yes, they need still to hear it from you.

6- Goal Orientation:
Be goal oriented, never let life’s minors entrap your soul, and drive you to drift from your major purpose, that is happiness for yourself whenever possible and for others as much as possible. You have problems at work, try to remember how many bigger troubles you had before and it all passed, so these will pass too, react to the world around you, but never allow it to get on your nerves driving you mad and sad.

7- SS (Smiley Sacrifice) Role:
Never sacrifice if you are not smiling widely while you do, a sacrificing that is done with sorrows is badly encoded and accordingly it is decoded into a missy perception. It adds a burden on you and never relief whom you sacrificed for. Remember you are not the chivalric savior of world, so you do not need to sacrifice helping others unless you are willing enough to do it without getting bothered.

8- Clean House Role:
Your physical, psychological and sexual health is pre-requisite of happiness. Your body and soul are the house that accommodates happiness visits, and happiness is meticulous, the more diseases your body has, the more burdens you carry on your soul, the more sexual frustrations you have, the less likely happiness to stop by and spend a day. Be as ready as you can to get it when it possibly knocks.

9- Inner Circle Role:
The more good folks you have in your intimate zone, the more moments of happiness you surely get with them, from them, or for them. Moments of happiness during loneliness is not impossible, but seldom happens except for artists and innovators in general. Remember, it takes “at least” two to tango.
These were few guidelines to increase our harvest of happy moments, in a life that is short and consumable by nature. However, you can forget all about these guidelines, and remember one statement, "Happiness comes as temporal waves in our life, it is not a shore wherein we can camp"

Happiness Waves-01


The importance of the word "Happiness" in our lives can be summarized when we state happiness to be the overall purpose of life. If you asked anyone why he is living he/she answers with a variety of goals, but if you kept extending your questions about goals of the goals you will reach happiness through anyway he will follows. If you tried asking a man why he lives, we can imagine the following dialogue with him

- I live to work
- And why do you work
- To get money and achieve self actualization
- Good, and why do u need both
- Money gets me all what I want, and self actualization makes me elated
- And when you get what you want, how do you feel? Happy we can say?
- Yes
- Same applies for the elation feelings related to achievements, right?
- Yes

Try to apply this model to any other dialogue, if he/she replied with “I live for my kids” you can take it the same way, you will end-up that he/she wants to achieve happiness through his siblings happiness. Even for a highly religious character, you will find the only difference is the extension of happiness purpose to cover the eternal life after death. Subsequently, happiness and its nature was a great interest since the start of philosophy and until this moment. Wide variety of happiness definitions did exist throughout mankind history. Starting from a simple straight forward definitions as “an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction” to Aristotelian perception of happiness as the only thing that humans desire for its own sake. He observed that men sought riches, or honor, or health, not for their own sake but in order to be happy. Happiness was an extended subject for philosophers to wonder about how a man can achieve it, for psychologists to explain it and link it specific activities or actions, for artistes to record in their great classics, and even for scientists to explain the mediators and chemical transmitters of happiness feelings. Yet, this is all far away from my subject today, which is all about the perception of happiness as extended status versus its perception as a momentary mode.

I see we usually have a misleading perception of happiness as an island where we rest after sailing in life’s oceans; we perceive it as an extended status or stage of life that we actually never reach, babies observing their elder brothers going to school will imagine reaching school age as the edge of happiness, which turns opposite when they reach it, students’ dream is graduation and independency, once achieved they realize that it was not the dreamed-of island. Same applies to love, marriage and children. For a position we are looking for as well as for annual income…etc. We keep waiting to attain happiness through reaching a specific stage in our lives, and this is the underlying cause of most of agonies and frustrations. Simply because this island of happy man does exist only in our minds and in the Nirvana of Buddhism, but not on this land.

I often visualize happiness as waves, situational status that might last for minutes or days, you might be happy now and few moments later you get a phone call that distracts your happiness, and vice versa, the curve of our happiness can never be a steady one, it is composed of countless peaks and valleys. Shall this mean we have nothing to do about it? No, we have surly the major role of guiding the frequency and duration of our happiness waves, everyone can elaborate about his own keys to moderate his waves, the keys I had uncovered myself in myself are:

1- Love Doers Role
2- Today-Tomorrow Scale
3- Soul Windows
4- Catch it Role
5- Balling Role
6- Goal Orientation
7- SS Role
8- Clean House Role
9- Inner Circle Role


On my next article, I will elaborate about the 9 roles one by one.