Happiness

Over the past few years, every time I have felt low and tried to look for happiness in the past, quite surprisingly, I have never found the moments of extreme jubilation from my past as my catharsis. It's strange because when I was in those moments, I thought life couldn't get better. I was all smiles and celebrating, sometimes a hard-earned achievement or just the moment yet it all looks so far away when I try to reach out to it in the moments of pain.

The flashes from the past that soothe my soul, in fact, are little innocuous moments I never paid much heed to. I picture myself walking aimlessly and with my earphones plugged in under the shade of trees that lined the green lawns near my college. Sometimes, I also find happiness in that postcard from the past where I can be found quietly reading a book in the peaceful greenery of that lawn under the winter sun. I discover happiness in that morning from the past when I woke up to the sight of a wet floor of my balcony under a cloud filled sky after a long spell of no rains. I find a happy man in the memory of walking down the road that led to the metro station with my best friend after a long day of studying in the library and involved in one of the million animated conversations that we had through the course of our friendship.

I have often wondered why does it always turn out like that? Why the moments where I thought I was the happiest never come back to balm my soul and the moments I never thought were particularly spectacular remind me of all the good that was there in the past and come as an assuring pat on my back me about future?  After much introspection, I came to a conclusion that seems to be much influenced by the traveling that I have undertaken over the last year.

Traveling is composed of innumerable hours spent in buses, trains, or even on foot and those moments, being so many, are hardly paid heed to. The photographs when we come back from those journeys are always of the places earmarked for sightseeing, the spectacular bits of our journeys. But the truth about traveling that I have understood is that a traveler grows on those long winding roads where he is apparently doing little than just seeing around the sights aplenty. The more one's thoughts engage with all those sights he encounters, the more he absorbs from his surroundings and the travels

In our lives, we human beings are mostly carrying the burdens of our past or our ambitions turn us into slaves of the unseen future. The more we grow up in life, the more our lives get shackled in either of such times and we begin to lose touch with our real selves. But like there is a silver lining to every cloud, these times of our lives are also punctuated by those moments where we are free of both the past and the future, moments where we just live. We often don't realize that we are in that moment because we don't have to try to feel that in such moments. And in those moments lies our true unblemished happiness, moments where our past and future fuse into a vacuum, just as there lies growth in the traveler's unsung journeys.

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On my last solo trip, I ended up trying Paragliding. It wasn't planned but was certainly one of those things on my to-do list that I knew I would tick off one day. As expected and many those who have done that daredevilry would testify, it was a surreal experience. After all, how often does an average human being experience the pleasures of flight? However, when I look back, it's not those 25 minutes where I was suspended mid-air hundreds of feet above the ground that remain etched in my mind as the most special memories from my travel. Instead, surprisingly, it was the 25 minutes leading up to it.

When I packed my bags for yet another adventure, Paragliding wasn't even remotely on my mind. The germ of the idea was sown in my mind by Lucille, an amazing French woman who I ended up befriending on the first afternoon of my trip. In fact, I wasn't even supposed to meet her on the day she asked me whether I would be interested to join her on her paragliding adventure. We just bumped into each other in the busy bazaar of Dharamshala while I was on my way to join an Australian couple (Dan and Paul) for lunch whom I had become friends with right at the beginning of my trip. Unsure of my answer, I asked her to wait. A couple of hours later, she met me again, and this time while I was enjoying my coffee with Dan and Paul and asked me whether I had made up my mind. It was there that I introduced Lucille to Dan and Paul, who asked us out of curiosity about our plans. Once Lucille floated the idea, Paul, the cricket-loving Aussie that he was, didn't wait a split second to jump on the bandwagon. And that's how three people, who didn't know the existence of each other a few hours ago ended up together in a three-hour car journey next morning to a little hill station nestled in the Himalayas.

We landed at Bir and signed as witnesses for each other on papers which, in short, said that the responsibility of anything, including death, while undertaking the activity lay solely on our shoulders. From Bir, the place for takeoff called Billing needed us to hop on to a jeep which then started climbing up the serpentine roads. A distance of 14 kilometres took 30 blissful minutes to cover as the narrow roads warranted extreme caution on the driver's part.

While our trainer accompanying us in the jeep chirped away in those ensuing minutes punctuated by saying silent prayers every time he saw a small idol on a treacherous turn, we three soon found ourselves lost in some other worlds. Paul was nervous and fidgety. Lucille was her usual calm self, enjoying and absorbing every vista her eyes fell on in a seemingly meditative state. I was sitting right between them and possibly in a world that stood at a neat bisection of theirs.

The nervous excitement had translated into a smile that stayed right there throughout those 30 minutes for me. It was as otherworldly a feeling as any. The sights, the smells, the lightness of air as we were climbing up only added to the feeling. But the most beautiful feeling was the wonder - not the wonder of the past or the future but of the present. Here we were, three people from worlds so different and in a land far away from our homes, embarking on a journey to experience something for the first time in our respective lives. To jump off a cliff together. To experience flight. I don't remember in the finest of details how it panned out but at some point, overwhelmed by the beauty of the journey, we held each others' hands. To calm Paul down who was now looking all the more nervous, I began to sing my own rendition of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World. Lucille joined in too and we all were smiling ear to ear.

10 minutes after that jeep journey, I was flying. I was ecstatic. I was shouting and screaming with joy and even singing my heart out, much to my trainer’s dismay. But as much I remember that flight, there is something about the journey leading to it that I would never forget. As I look back, I find happiness there. An experience of a joy like no other.