A Penny on Happiness...

There are few words in life, and defining those words, takes an entire life...and most ironical of all this is, life itself happens to be one such word..love and happiness are few others...and since love is so talked and discussed about, come a less debated one...happiness..

I read a novel by Jodi Picoult a couple of months back...never bothered writing about it, because it happens to be a novel with an open end..you just won't know what to do with it..it grips you strong and then leaves you wandering for answers...like with most of Picoult's work, this one forces you take one side, the only catch being there is never a completely right or wrong side...

Anyways, it so happens that the dad of the main character in the novel happens to be an economist...and he has theorems and equations for a lot of intangibles..and maybe that's where economics gets an edge over maths and physics...it's easy to play with figures are reach out to a definite conclusion, but how does one ever reach to the conclusion for an emotion..how do you define a rule for something, which by virtue of it is random...

There is a particular line (out of quiet a few) in that novel that caught my fancy, "A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations."

It looks so simple...only if it truly was...for ir does give the formula, the underlying equation and it still doesn't tell you how to really achieve either of the two ways...if only improving the reality or lowering the expectation was even half as easy as it is to ask someone to do it...

Do we really start expecting more over the years...I really am baffled by the question...if I remember correctly (even with my failing presence of mind...) nothing much has changed in what I wanted as a 16 year old till date (yeah a gal is always stuck at sweet 16 :D ) Maybe what has changed is that slowly the reality sinks in...the reality that what looked easy enough to achieve once, slowly became possible to achieve if really dedicated, to its tough to get it but then dreams are always tough to achieve, to finally the inevitable end of, we see dreams because they are a good way to escape reality and dream rarely do come true...

The reality also probably never changes...it just sinks in more deep...or takes a new face...no one really knows which way it goes..

And yeah, though I accept that I am lil high on the cribbing scale, sometimes I really do wonder, how many of us, the people of our age, our times...are really happy...am I the odd one out, or is it normal to spend days in search of one true happy moment..A long lasting satisfaction and peace, now looks like a distant dream...there are miles before it happens, there are miles before I 'll b contend...