The desire to be free from suffering and be happy is innate in every living being. A tiny bug will struggle to escape when it falls into a spider web. A cow will tear up when it senses that it will be slaughtered. And of course we as human beings have the perpetual tendency to withdraw from any predicament. But if all of our spiritual teachings are saying that happiness is our birthright, then how is it that this search seems to be a never ending saga in our lives?
While we all say we want to be happy, we do not always take the option to experience joy. Happiness is more than a birthright or a prerogative, it is also a choice. Yet when we make this choice, though often unconsciously, we make it with strings attached. "I will be satisfied if I can make X amount of money...I will be so content if I find the love of my life...If only my family is happy and in good health, I will have nothing else to ask for..." This is called bargaining and doomed to be a lose-lose situation. When you cannot achieve these goals, you call them unfulfilled dreams. But even when you have met these life "objectives", you may be happy for a while only to learn later that you need to fill the vacuum inside you with other new goals to get excited again. In other words, this is a moving target or what is coined as the hedonic treadmill by researchers Brickman and Campbell in 1971. It is the tendency of a person to return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or changes in life. Human beings are wired this way as a species so as to adapt to changing external events and environment for survival. While this may have served us in our evolution, the meaning of our existence is not simply to prolong our life span. It is up to us to make the conscious choice to be happy unconditionally no matter what the outside circumstances are. It is not a promise to ecstasy 24/7 nor a desensitisation agent, but a knowing that happiness is from within when you have a deep faith that abundance is an attitude.
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