A Happier 2018

As the clock runs steadily towards 12AM, everyone young or old, is forced into this contemplation over the past year. 2017 has been a general emotional upheaval for most people. Yet there is always something about the dawn of a fresh, crisp year that entices people to hope for happier beginnings and endings.
Happiness! The ever elusive, never lasting, momentary guest. A friend and I were recently discussing the romanticism of sadness. How unknowingly, humans can fall in love with a miserable state. There is some sort of sadistic pleasure derived in prodding our pain and nursing our agony. The ugly scab you know you shouldn’t touch but you keep picking at. A book I read by the ever so interesting Eckhart Tolle claims that all human beings have pain bodies. These are unique victim identities we associate with ourselves in comparison to traumatic life events we go through. Many of us unconsciously or subconsciously carry this pain body with us wherever we go . We build our future identities from it, we love to dramatise it, bring it up any conversation, some even polishing it to wear as a shiny badge for the world to see. I wonder why we do this? Why do the horrible things that we go through, we let define us. Would I be as romantically in love with my happiness? If happiness is self-made, than why has the majority of us so impressively failed to hang on to it? Could it be that we are genetically more inclined towards negative feelings, doubt, insecurity, self-pity, depression?

As I sit in one Islamabads many cafes, sipping on a stupidly expensive cup of green tea (which I know is lipton soaked the hell out of in a tea cup), I look around at the graduates of 2017. Everyone looks seemingly content, deep in conversation, smiling. The surface is always a façade, every person carrying some form of pain or the other. If the year has not been kind to you, you better believe that it has not been kind to thousands just like you. My cynical devious mind catches up to me once again. Another sip is taken, a cigarette is lit.

Its human interaction; the closest you can get to happiness. Something so small and insignificant, we miss it each and everytime, yet so powerful. It takes a hell lot of emotional depth to understand the wisdom in it. It’s in this sweet looking mothers look as she wipes the cereal off her baby, the furrowed brow of a concerned father as he drops his daughter to her friends, the firm yet gentle grasp of two lovers holding hands, the look he gives her when she walks into a room, the deep adoration in the eyes of a dog towards his master, the crazy almost manic laughter of two best friends sharing a joke, the peace felt when you hold a baby, that cup of care made for a sick parent, the drug-high of being madly in love. The relationships we build, those heavy 10pm conversations about life, feelings, poverty, humanitarian development, travel, nature, parents, responsibilities, pain, religion. Happiness and the good stuff is always an extract of these. Make the call! Drop that text! Spend that time! Wallow in something meaningful!
Heres to a happier 2018!

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