A little help for happiness…

Today I want to share a very old, yet very sweet memory with you. I was travelling by the metro from my workplace to my home. There was not so much crowd that day. After a stop, the metro stopped and there was an announcement, “There is a short delay in this journey, we apologise for the inconvenience caused.” Most of the people got grumpy listening to the announcement. I was listening to the music but after some time, I realised that I had no idea which song I was listening to because I was so lost in observing the people around there. I was kind of enjoying that, reading their facial expressions and making up the stories by myself.

Suddenly I looked at a kid around 5-6 years old, who was sitting beside his mother asking her, “When will the train start”. His mother replied, “I don’t know kid. We can only wait.”

The kid was not satisfied with the answer. He was looking outside the window with his eyes wandering here and there. As I was saying, I was enjoying reading the facial expressions, this one also intrigued me. I started making some stories in my head. “What is he thinking? Is he trying to know the cause of this inconvenience? Is he thinking of doing something about it.” This is where something struck me. I said him, “The train will start when we start pushing” He was surprised and asked, “Really? So should I start pushing” I replied, “Just wait for some time. Not all the passengers are here. Let them come first.”

As I saw the green signal there, I shouted to the boy, “Now push with all of your strength” He and I started pushing in the direction of engine. There was an appeased smile on his face as the train started moving. I can’t explain the whole moment here. It was incredible. He was so excited and started to shout, “We did it! We did it!” It was like he had launched a missile or something. Now he was travelling in the metro which he helped to start. I could have told him the whole technical story about the faults in engine or signals, but I thought he will find out that eventually. He is a 6 year old kid. Let him enjoy this.

You see, it’s good to pause in the pursuit of happiness and just be happy. It’s not always necessary to find out the actual reason for happiness. Happiness is not something which is present in our circumstance, but in ourselves. It’s not about every achievement placed in a perfect order in your drawer of life, but stringing together a bunch of small pleasures.