One can see,hear,feel and smell...one is born the five basic senses..one knows how to dream..but yet, somehow, one feels the pinch in real life. The absence of the feeling to be alive. The feeling that life, in all its menacing ways, is trying to twist you off your feet and wrench you into submissiveness of what can be touted as "The Flow". Somehow, you just dont feel satisfied with the day to day workings of your life. You know something is wrong, but somehow you feel that it cant be fixed. You feel that going against convention is never going to be accepted..yet that's exactly what Creative Speakers and your elders advise you to do. So, the queestion arises : Where do u strike a balance between compromise and convention? Where do ou draw the line between being a random follower of the herd and turning your back and striking a new path? How do you find the Chutz-pah to move on, walk away and go your own way? I guess the winners in life, are those who find the answer to this ever gnawing question. One can never be told of what to do, and what not. But yet, one is constantly told in one way or the other, be it parents, teachers, the boss, the wife/husband, the children and finally, the nurse at your old age home. When does one think, or rather do something, what one wants to do? Or is it that the door is always wide open, but you got to have the balls to take the leap of faith? How does one do it? How is it possible to gain the mental make up to do what you want? How does it come to place that once you take your step, there s no looking back, there s no taking back what you did, there s no way to turn and come back! How does one move according to what the heart says, and not be overcome by the intense pressures of what your basic senses tell you and are processed by your brain! How does one romanticise about the fact that Life should be lived with your heart and not your head? Or has the world today become such a ferocious place, that the winner is determined by how conventional he can be..where the person who wants to do the thing his heart tells him to do will be inevitably, 9 times out of 10 be branded a loser?

There are two kinds of people : people who can be branded as 'idealistic' and those who are 'practical'. We are taught, rather conditioned, our entire lives, to live life the practical way.yet, there is an opposite tug where people tell you to live your life by what you want to do. There are intellectuals who state that one ahs to do what one loves..that God has put us on this green earth for a purpose. Every human is supposedly indispensable. Then why is it that we see many people unhappy? Doing jobs that they dont want to do, making career choices based on someone else's ideals, student suicides? Why is nt there a logic, a sense of correctness in what they preach? How come the theories that people who consider themselves the most knowledgeable, the ones that consider that their paths are what defines right prove to be the root of unhappiness?
Victor Hugo once famously quoted “The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”The real preaches that the fittest survive, but the ideal, in my opinion is what makes life worth living. "Only the happiest survive". I believe that when one does something that someone likes doing, one is more likely to stay happy and more likely to put an effort, or rather an interest into what one does. One does not need a robotic schedule, a need of constant badgering, a requirement of the colossal follow up or the need for frustration. One will automatically work and strive to achieve one's goal. Isnt that what one can define success by? Is nt that the better option to live by? Would nt it be so much better to be bound by one s own expectation, than carry the burden of everyone else's and cheat yourself of your own? Wouldnt it be better to trash our own expectation than to trsh everyone else around us? Just as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe rightly pointed out "a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished". It is those people whose real clashes with the ideal that ends up hurting themselves.



I find the statement "Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul" by Samuel Ullman, very engaging. Doesn't one feel tired and worn out by doing what one doesnt want to do? Doesn't one feel the need to quit and resign themselves to a fate? Doesn't one want to give up and hang up the gloves before the fight is over? Doesn't one lose hope and get desolate and feel the need for release? Doesn't that sound similar to a person who s old and forlon and has given up the will to live? Isn't that what wrinkles the soul? Isn't that why people give up despite having talents inside them?

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle. Why do we pride ourselves on being cattle? Why do we force convention instead of nurturing dreams? Why isn't the system designed to help find people their places in life? Why hasn't one realised the power of productivity in doing what one loves?Why doesnt one decide to find his own happiness and not through the eyes of someone else? Why is one forced to follow and not lead? Somehow, i just cant fathom the way the world works anymore.. Sometimes, it just doesn t matter. Sometimes, the fact that one doesn't need the world except peace and happiness doesn't drive into the minds of the individuals today! It's truly a sad thing to realise that one has everything in the world, all the amenities, the facilities, yet the only things that people cannot find in this world are love,kindness,empathy and above all...happiness!

So how can one define happiness?

So many people plan their lives for a distant goal'.They believe that if they become a professional or win a gold medal or score a rank, their lives will rise out of humdrum ordinariness. This isn't so. What one doesnt realise is that there's a rush of glory and then it fades. The sting of tragedy disperses equally as fast.The genetic view of the `sense of happiness' has implications for the cause of well-being because a person's genetic code translates into how their neurology behaves. Medical science tells us that, dopamine—the brain's chemical for pleasure—and serotonin, a reduction in which can lead to misery. Neurotransmitters pass information from the synapse or junction between one nerve cell and another nerve cell or muscle. The nerve cell's bulbous end releases them from storage when an electrical impulse moving along the nerve reaches it. Then they cross the junction to dock at the other nerve cell's receptor, and either prompt or inhibit the impulses along the second cell. The first nerve cell reabsorbs excess neurotransmitters, but not necessarily all of them. Those that remain free-floating, according to biology, help create our happy or miserable states of being.
Or does one find happiness through spirituality, the feeling of doing good onto others? Or does one find it through Karma? The notion that doing good begets good..making people happy makes you happy? Does one find happiness through salvation? Mythology reveals that those who find salvation become some of the happiest people around. Is this probably the reason why one just wants to let go?



Whatever it is, one is on the constant pusuit of happiness that a few lucky pause to find. For me true happiness is in the hands of the person who lives by his own life, answerable to himself and God and to noone else. Happiness is in the freedom to live your own life, commit mistakes and correct them and to learn lessons through them. Happiness is setting your own targets and seeing them through to fruition. Happiness is a state of mind where one truly feels whole. Only the happiest survive..the rest fade away into the dust.