Serendipity

Plans.

In an age of Mckinsey and cellphones, they are inescapable. Goals, milestones, timelines. The shelves at Barnes and Nobles are filled with well-intentioned books taht help you plan your life -how to find a husband in 30 days, how to be a millionaire, how to be CEO by the age of 40, five steps to emotional healing. There are self-help groups even for eight year olds which starts by saying "your parents got divorced - don't worry, here's how you can deal with it." And get this – there are self-help books for writing self-help books. There is no room for doubt here. It’s not for the faint hearted – there is one book that says, “why your life sucks and what you can do about it. " For every problem, there is a solution – all it takes is a plan.

But the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry ….because no matter how hard you try or how meticulous you might be, you just never know where life will take you. I am not against planning per se. I am not advocating sitting on your butt and not doing anything. Sure, you need a plan if you want to save for your kid’s college or if you to want start your own business. But to believe that for all of life’s twists and turns, there is plan - is hubris. Because beyond all of us, there is a divine plan. A universe that has a mind of its own.

And sometimes in the minutiae of our plans, we lose our dreams. As an MBA type will tell you, plans need to be sensible and practical. But as any dreamer will tell you, dreams only need a wing and a prayer. Dreams allow us to indulge our mad passions, our insane aspirations. Dreams. They course through our veins like a mighty river. They let you believe in the infinite possibilities of life. Possibilities that are not bound by reason or rationality.

The tyranny of planning is almost pervasive. When we are not busy making grand plans about our life, we obsess about planning our every waking minute. We make checklists and to-do lists and schedules – because nothing can be left unaccounted for. What are your plans for this weekend is a common phrase in this part of the world – so we plan to meet our friends for lunch, we plan to go hiking, we plan to watch a movie. There are certain things that need plans – budgets, projects, meetings – but a Sunday morning is not one of them. Unless it’s a weekend expedition to the Antarctic – do you really need an itinerary? Aren’t weekends supposed to be easy – a time to kick back and hang loose. At times, we should perhaps let go and just be. And maybe life will quietly surprise us.

Was it John Lennon who said – life is what happens, when we are busy making other plans?
Serendipity. It’s a wonderful thing.

Happiness is a bullshit idea

We live in a culture where we are bombarded by the notion that we ought to be happy. And the right to live in unadulterated bliss is an idea that has been enshrined in America’s constitution. Hallmark has made an industry out of this with sweet mushy cards that say, “may you find happiness which ever path you take…”, “happy birthday – hope you find all the success you deserve.” Ever occasion is used to peddle this idea – Mothers day, New Years Day, Birthday and oh yes …Valentines Day.

But after much research and careful consideration (that involved staring at the ceiling because I was unable to fall asleep), I have come to the conclusion that happiness is a bullshit idea.

There are very few people who are genuinely happy – happy in a deep, constant and grounded way. Perhaps, the Dalia Lama is – but then he is someone who is well on his way to Nirvana. For the rest of us, we experience happiness in bursts – when we get the job that we wanted, when we ‘fall’ in love, when eat chocolate cake – but that feeling lasts only for two months, two weeks or as in the case of the chocolate cake – only two hours. And then the yearning starts again, and we crave another dose of what we think is likely to make us happy – the perfect guy, the perfect job, the perfect dress.

Happiness has been a subject of much philosophical debate – and great minds such as Aristotle, JS Mill and Nietzsche have crafted complex arguments around this ("Two Conceptions of Happiness.) . More recently economists have started taking an interest in this issue, and it turns out that several studies confirm what Grandma always knew - money can’t buy you happiness. One of the most consistent findings has been that the correlation between financial wealth and well-being is relatively weak, especially as countries become wealthier. Paul Krugman has an interesting article about this – the CPI and the Rat Race. The Economist published a long, meandering article that examines the concepts of relative poverty and relative happiness. It compares two men--a doctor in Congo and a retired coal miner worker in Kentucky--who earn about the same amount of absolute income. The contrast proves to be a good set-up for some provocative questions. Another study published by UK’s New Scientist found the happiest people in the World live in Nigeria which happens to be one of the poorest and the most countries on the planet.

The thing is pursing happiness is counter productive and futile. For one life in inherently unfair - it was never meant to be a walk in the park. And the more time we spending wanting and yearning to be happy, the less likely we are to find it – in fact we may end up being more sad. 'Ask yourself whether you are happy,' wrote John Stuart Mill, more than 100 years ago, 'and you cease to be so.' So if only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne