Your random acts of kindness like helping a blind man cross the street, giving free tuition to poor children or cleaning your surroundings, never go waste as they get deposited in your happiness account. If you refuse to 160 | 31 Ways to Happiness Deposit in Your Happiness Account | 161 accept any remuneration for your good work, you enrich yourself spiritually by getting more joy in your life.
What you like and dislike tells you what you are. Knowing the self is the greatest wisdom, because when you discover yourself, you also discover your source of happiness within.
Most people are unhappy since they fail to get what they want in life. However, even when they actually get what they want, their happiness is short-lived because very soon they raise the bar to a higher level and again start struggling to achieve the next level. Their happiness level thus comes back to the original level as before.
It is not possible to have a one-size-fit-all formula for happiness. What works for one person may not work for another. Everyone has to choose his own methods to achieve happiness.
Happiness is the result of a positive experience of our inner world with the outer world, which in turn creates trust between us and the world.
When you have multiple options and you can choose only one, you often feel unhappy about discarding the rest of the options, when your chosen option does not provide you happiness and satisfaction. Also, when you have multiple options, you never feel settled since you are always moving from one option to another, one person to another and one job to another which ends up making your life more miserable than enjoyable.
There are millions of people in the modern world who have earned enough money to be able to live their lives comfortably without doing anything for a living. 228 | 31 Ways to Happiness Conquer Your Boredom | 229 However, most of them fail to live happily because they get bored if they do nothing. Many people don’t work for the sake of money. They work to avoid boredom.
If you know what you want and discover true happiness in what you have, you do not need to buy expensive things to prove to the world that you are happy.
We must remember that pain is just the other side of joy. If you avoid all possibilities to pain, you also block all avenues of happiness. It is like writing an examination. If you want to be absolutely sure that you don’t fail, you don’t write the examination. However, by doing so, you also block all your chances of success.
There is no formula for happiness. Yet none of the formula of happiness are wrong.
True knowledge is thus the key to happiness. However, you can’t have such knowledge merely from books or by listening to scholars. True knowledge comes only by experiencing life and connecting the dots. When you are aware and your mind is disciplined, true knowledge flows from all directions into your being.
It is not enough to only discover your potential. Your potential, at best, is like a rock from which the statue is yet to be carved. A rock of raw diamond can’t be used to make rings and the dust of gold is useless for all practical purposes. Only by honing your skill through hard work, you can develop your potential and achieve happiness and success in your life.
There are so many things which we have but have not paid any attention to them. If only we can learn to appreciate our blessings, we can enjoy great happiness.
A beautiful and joyful life can’t be created by following any principle or dogma or by following all the principles in a random manner. You have to learn the art of harmonising all the principles of happiness in a way that matches the rhythm of your life and creates happiness for you.
There can’t be any formula for happiness because happiness is an effect and not a cause. The same activity, which at one time gave you happiness, may now become a source of suffering. Or often a great suffering ends up becoming a source of joy.
Love is like a living being with a body and a soul. The soul of love is emotion while the body of love is action. Just like body and soul are integrated, emotions and actions too are integrated. You do some loving actions naturally when you feel love for a person. But, if the actions are missing, even 104 | 31 Ways to Happiness Manage Your Love | 105 though the feelings might be there, love can’t survive for long.
Every bad experience is a source of unhappiness. Yet the intensity of suffering can be controlled. Just like a person who has a million-dollar bank balance is likely to get less disturbed due to loss of a few dollars, you too can easily overcome some bad incidents in your life, without losing much joy, provided you already have a great amount of happiness in your life.
Your conscience is not only the repository of your failures but also of your successes. It contains your vileness as also your goodness. The more good deeds you have performed in the past, the more happiness will be at your disposal all the time. You can always borrow some of that happiness when you are feeling low.
Happy people know that all the imperfections of the world are due to the conditioning of our minds which seeks perfection in the world according to the moral and statuary laws. Unless you free yourself from the binding of the rules and laws, there will hardly be any place for happiness in your life.
Instead of arguing whether happiness gives one success or success makes one happy, we may agree that happiness and success are interconnected with each other and are the cause and effect of each other. Similarly, failure and unhappiness are also cause and effect of each other.
