The Walk of Life
Just a couple of lines to kick off another busy week. The pandemic doesn't look like it is abating and I'm glad that I at least is busy with work that I can do from the safety of my home.
What a far cry from my life two decades ago when I used to travel around the region every other week. Now I don't even leave my house at all for days on end! But I'm learning more than ever before. As long as I have an opportunity to do that, I should be reasonably happy.
The Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about the experiencing self and the remembering self and how the two have different conceptions of 'happiness'. The remembering self summarizes a whole swath of time as a kind of 'story' with a definite outcome: happy or unhappy. While the experiencing self--the way we feel from moment to moment while we are living our lives, could be very different.
"I'm alright, right now", is a good refrain I learned from Gurudeva, whenever I feel a certain uncertainty in my life. I am alive, breathing and at this very moment, safe. And that is 'happiness'--the happiness of the experiencing self.
Right now, I'm typing these words and watching them appear on the computer screen. How delightful is that? How miraculous! With a click of a button, my thoughts go out into the world, exposed in cyberspace, etched in the akasha.
To be healthy enough to think, understand and act is already a great blessing. My bar for happiness is set very low indeed. Happiness is being grateful for all that you've been given and having the strength and energy to continue improving yourself every day.
Tomorrow is another new day, beckoning like a blank canvas waiting to be painted. I will experiment with new strokes, trying out different shapes and colours--some will work, some won't. But that is alright. Life is an exercise in drawing. The important think is to put pen or brush to paper and then things will begin to happen.
To live is to be an artist every day. The artist Paul Klee once said: "Drawing is like taking a line for a walk". Life is like that too. Do not rush through it. Take a walk. And every step you make is sheer happiness. Life doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
