Take time to enjoy the little things

It’s that time of the year when I can’t but help look back. As always I think but where did the days go? All those things I meant to do during the year, how did they stay undone? The big things get done; they are signed, sealed and delivered.

The big things will get done because there is someone out there waiting for you to honour your commitment. That someone will do whatever is necessary to prod you into finishing.

But there isn’t anyone who is going to chase after you demanding: Have you called your friend Vishwas yet? Have you started reading Proust yet? Have you taken an afternoon off to go for a movie? Did you lean back into your seat and lose yourself in that imagined reality?

We assume that it is the big things that will make us happy. A house and a vehicle. A 54’ LED TV, a Persian rug and a solitaire.

We assume that if we ensure that our children are secure and our parents looked after, we have beaten the path to happiness. We assume that if we holiday by the sea once a year and spend money on frivolities, our lives are blessed.

We assume every career milestone is a notch on that totemic pole called success and that will vault us into happily ever after.

So we close our eyes to the intangible and the abstract, the frivolous and the not-so-important triggers of joy that don’t have any calibration methods. Instead we seek happiness by the weightage of the big things. And the little things get left behind.

The feel of a dog’s snout nudging your knee, the call of a dove, the strains of a familiar song, a letter from a friend….

All joy, big or small, is transient. All joy has its own degrees of well being it evokes in us. The trick is to intersperse the big with the small.

The greater splashes with the lesser waves. Somewhere along the line, the happiness index will even out. Somewhere along the line, we will cease to be less dissatisfied with life and ourselves.