Spiritual Seasoning

And here I am again, blogging on a Friday afternoon from a suburban mall cafe. You see a lot of people on Friday afternoons--it's the crowd that gets spilled out from offices for Friday prayers at the mosque. It's probably the happiest time of the week because a whole weekend of rest looms ahead and it hasn't even begun yet. Often the anticipation of pleasure is better than the actual experience itself.

But I shall not write about the philosophy of pain or pleasure today for I already have too many articles about that. I will instead reflect on the moments of great happiness in my life and see if I understand their significance.

I remember being very happy as a child riding the swing at the local park. These are wooden boards held up by two strong interlocking steel chains fastened to an overhead beam. By standing on them, one could just squat and stand repeatedly to propel oneself into the air, tracing a semi-circular trajectory in pendulum motion. I enjoyed the feeling of being as free as a bird in the air,  pushing my swing into as large an arc as possible, my momentum lifting me, until my body was horizontal to the ground. That's the unbridled joy of a child, being flung into the embrace of the cosmos.

And then later as a teenager, it was the 3-1 victory of the Malaysian team against South Korea in the Olympic qualifiers (yes that match that inspired the hit movie Ola Bola), that infused me with so much patriotic joy. I had even told myself then, this must be the happiest day of my young life. 

Such peaks of ecstasy, I must say, have never been reached again. Maybe as one grows older, one tempers one's expression of happiness for fear of over-indulgence. Happiness seems to mature into a more spread-out feeling of relief, contentment and gratitude. 

Having to do well in SPM and STPM were the most difficult challenges of my teenage years. But passing them with flying colours didn't give me great joy: it was just pure relief for the pressure was simply too intense. Later, graduating from university with a degree gave me even less pleasure. There was hardly a celebration for I had thought that the whole tertiary education thing was a bit of a farce. It was a non-event. Its attainment merely gave me a passport into the working world.

Adulthood and the working life was simply a quest for self-discovery. One learns more about oneself by first conforming to what society expects only to find them empty and unsatisfactory.  The ecstasy of a child-on-a-swing lofted high into the air is not one would expect from adult happiness. Maturity tinges everything with a poignant undertone, especially material success.

Slowly one's spiritual impulse emerges, promising a contentment that is deep and transcendental.  The child finds happiness in a lump of sugar which he sucks with glee but the adult learns that it is the subtlety of seasoning in one's meal that brings out the true pleasure of food.  And there-in lies the true meaning of spiritual happiness: it is a life that is seasoned with simple pleasures.