Finding happiness & fulfillment
2 incidents that awakened me to where I could possibly find them
This year, it has been my intention to strengthen my mindfulness and meditation practices. And the universe has been very supportive of my endeavor, directing me to books & teachers that are opening my mind to see things differently and I am grateful I can sense progress on my journey.
Incident 1 & some key realizations:
Recently I was practicing a guided meditation of Thich Nahn Hanh & in that he said something very beautiful. He said, ‘you have nothing to do, just sit and enjoy your breath'. While I had heard meditation teachers say, ‘focus on your breath' or ‘pay attention to your breath', ‘enjoy your breath' was a phrase I was hearing for the first time & it blew my mind. It gave me a sense of freedom, like I didn't have to try hard to focus, be present or anything of that sort. All I had to do was sit & enjoy doing nothing. With just this one change of perspective I was able to advance my practice of sitting from 20 to 45 minutes.
“Being alive is a miracle. Just sitting there enjoying your in breath & out breath is already happiness. Breathing in, I know I am alive. Breathing out, I smile to life, in me & around me.” - Thich Naht Hanh
I began to wonder if I could take this perspective of finding enjoyment into other activities of my day. Thus began my exploration into finding fulfillment in everyday life.
If we look at some of our daily activities, you will notice they roughly fall under the following categories:
A. Mundane routine tasks like brushing, bathing, eating, cleaning, folding clothes, cooking etc. :
The intention here is to finish the task & get on with life. Most of us are hardly present with these kind of routine activities. In fact these tasks are sometimes even found annoying as we feel they come in the way of us using our time to do something more productive (And by productive I mean activities we think we should do that will improve our life in the future).
B. Purposeful tasks like our professional work, a project or some other personal goal:
Here our intention is primarily to make progress. The focus is on the result, the destination point B that we need to reach from point A.
C. Recreational activities such as sports and hobbies:
Here the intention is usually to find joy. We often refer to these as "stress busters".
D. Interpersonal relationships:
Engagement with our family, friends, acquaintances etc. Here our ability to be attentive is somewhat dependent on who we are interacting with.
The Challenge:
So the challenge for me was to change my intention for each of these activities from whatever they typically are to - ‘Finding enjoyment'.
The Realizations:
I realized in order to find enjoyment I had to show a higher degree of conscious presence.
More involvement, presence, engagement = Greater joy & fulfillment with the task at hand. Irrespective of what category the task fell under.
And to consciously intend staying present required that I changed my mindset from believing that I had a guaranteed tomorrow to believing that all I had was that moment. And I could transform it into something magical for myself.
To think of it, isn't that really the truth?
This moment is all we have. And how we receive it, is a choice. A choice that determines the quality of our experience & the internal fulfillment we derive.
In this very moment you are making a choice. A choice of reading this post. And you can do this by either skimming the words to get to the finish as quickly as possible. Or you can choose to savor the words and connect with me, the writer. And what you choose will change the experience of this seemingly mundane task of reading.
Isn't fulfillment then not a function of the moments themselves but in how we choose to receive them?
Incident 2:
Back in the days when I used to work in the Ad agency I used to sometimes travel back home from office (a distance of about 10 kms or so) for lunch. I used to do this because I missed home. I would wistfully look at my house balcony and wonder whether I would ever find the time to sit and enjoy that space.
Fast forward to now, as I was sitting in my balcony, my mind went, "what am I doing sitting in the balcony, when I should be creating more impact".
Thanks to my mindfulness practice, I could catch this thought before it slipped away unexamined. I was amazed at my inability to enjoy what life was offering me.
Even though there was enough & more reasons to enjoy, my mind wasn't completely happy or at ease. It's what we refer to as FOMO or the fear of missing out that was playing in my head.
A fallacious thinking that interferes with finding fulfillment in the here & now. Robert Frost summarizes this predicament beautifully in his poem, Escapist- Never where he says :
“His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.
It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.”
We can spend our entire life dissatisfied looking for that perfect elixir to life invariably lingering somewhere in the future or we can intend to find enjoyment in what we already have within & around us.
The truth is if we don't have the capacity to be happy in this moment then we cannot be happy at any point of time. The happiness which is in the future is an illusion. Like the mirage in a desert.
We need to stop fooling ourselves that someday we will find it. And awaken to the possibility of being happy and fulfilled right now.
So when I had this realization, I made a resolve. Not to stop working towards my goals or desires.
Hell no.
But to live in the truth of the fact that no attainment of goal was going to make me happy. Happiness and fulfillment were already available to me. And I could claim it by learning to better engage with my environment & to appreciate what I already had, within & around me.
As we come to the end of the post I invite you to start paying attention to how you approach some of your own daily activities. Do you intend to enjoy & find fulfillment in them or do you rush past them or make them a means to an end? Do you believe that you can be happy now or do you think it's something you need to strive for? Let me know in comments or write back. I would love to see things from your perspective 🙂
As usual great topic to be picked and discussed. We should always find happines in every small activity we do; be it brushing our teeth or taking a walk in the beach. Especially loved the quotes by Thich Naht Hanh..
It's great writing and insight. I love this thought of enjoying breath and doing mundane tasks with mindfulness. I WILL BE HAPPY WHEN - that thought was questioned after reading your post. Nice thoughts to ponder on..