Why postpone happiness?

Most of us love making New Year resolutions; it's a ritual. But hardly anyone achieves compliance, because all those resolutions just disappear in the hurly burly of life. We set high expectations, and the goals are difficult to sustain. It might be more practical to take one small step at a time.

On another note, postponing moments of happiness is another bane of our times. There is this very apt, insightful story that Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would narrate to indicate the importance of living in the present. He would say, 'Someone I knew once said to his Buddhist teacher, 'Master, I would like to go on a picnic with you.' The teacher was very busy, so he replied, 'Sure, sure, we'll go on a picnic one of these days.' Five years later, they still hadn't had the picnic.

'One day the master and the disciple were on some business together, and they were caught in a traffic jam. There were so many people in the street that the master asked the disciple, 'What are all these people doing?' The disciple saw that it was a funeral procession. He turned to the master and said, 'They're having a picnic.''


So, it transpires that most of us, entangled in the busyness of daily living, forget to make time for and savour the experience of happiness that is really not so difficult to achieve. A walk in the park, a picnic in the woods or by the river, window shopping with nothing to buy - these are little nuggets of joy that evade us each time we get 'busy' living life.