HAPPINESS

"That's the thing about unhappiness. All it takes is for something worse to come along, and you realize it was actually happiness after all."

I was watching The Crown on Netflix the other day. Queen Elizabeth commented after President Kennedy's death when her mother asked about Jackie Kennedy's unhappiness.

As a lifelong student of life, these words of Queen made a lasting impression on my mind. As human beings, aren't we generally programmed to keep taking things for granted until it's lost or taken away? We tend to believe unhappiness to be real and happiness to be some distant goal that needs to be achieved. Rarely we human beings are contended with what 'it is,' only to be shaken out of the slumber when that 'it is' is lost or gone forever. The words from the Queen were nothing extraordinary, and we all know such words of wisdom, but sometimes some words impact us more than others. Whenever I feel dissatisfied with anything or, for that matter, anyone in my family is complaining about something trivial, I try to remind myself and them to enjoy whatever 'it is' for nothing is forever, and things could be worse. Again, the concept is nothing new, but the last two years of the pandemic have indeed changed our perspective, and we need to unlearn our deep conditioning.