What makes a person happy? What makes us want to smile? Most of us search our entire lives for that magic formula that adds self-contentment and zeal; transforming our existence into life.
Putting aside all the cliché answers, any true patron of the movie “Fight Club” would say that it can be anything that makes you tick. As Tyler Durden taught us, there is no limitation on the outlandish nature of our mood controller. For the uninitiated, Tyler got kicks out of ‘selling rich women their fat [that they got removed through liposuction] back as soaps’, ‘fucking Marla till the end of eternity’ and ‘venting out his frustration by fighting’. Strange as it may sound to some; but these things kept him happy. These things ensured that when he got up he had a smile on his face and looked forward to each day like it was his last; consequently living it to the fullest.
Though there are some basic needs that all humans have [e.g. the need for sex], there is one cliché that holds true for most of us – ‘You are unique, just like everyone else’. Each of us have some uniqueness in what drives us, what keeps us happy and what motivates us to do the unimaginable. For ages countless studies have been done to try and decipher what makes someone be him or her. But most if not all have resulted in inadequate conclusions. The sole reasoning behind this, in my mind, is the fact that nobody except the individual can decipher what makes him/her happy.
Friends and family are just travelers who stand beside you to provide any help if needed be, but only an individual himself can figure out the reasoning behind his grieving nature. A forward I read stated that “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full ofgarbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it. And if you let them, they'll dump it on you.” That choice also remains with you.
Most of us spend our time just putting the pieces of our lives together. Trying hard and hoping that someday it’ll make the beautiful picture that we dream of. But just putting the pieces together will never make them stay in place; we need a glue to keep it together. And no one else can provide that to us. Spouses can help us put the glue in the right places, but the glue needs to come from us. This glue is the magic formula that we look for, the list of things that’ll make us happy. Well learning this magic should be the easiest thing in the world especially considering that the spell is within us, we only have to cast it and it has to be casted on us.
But we’re humans and not magicians. We can’t just cast a spell and make everything in our lives fine. Yet, I have chosen to take small steps. Discover things that make me happy. Every day I want to give myself at least one reason to look forward to the next day. It’s not to say I’ll leave aside all planning for a long beautiful life but I need to give myself reasons to ‘live’ it that long. A mere existence for 70 years carries little with it except pain and grief.
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