To be happy in adversity is the real happiness

January 1 is the first day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. But the dawn of this year assumes more importance as it marks the beginning of a new decade. While a new calendar has already replaced the old in our homes, new resolutions, ambitions, expectations and responsibilities, programmes and calculations have also lined up for implementation.

While for many, the year and the decade passed by might have been loaded with sweet recollections and cheerful times, for several others the period might have been without any change or even found to be worse.

Becoming better is something that we strive to do every day. But very often due to the hustle and bustle of everyday life, certain things go by the wayside. Still we hope for the good to happen at the beginning of every year.

While some of our resolutions may relate to our body and business — success, prosperity and happiness, there could also be decisions for spending less and saving more.

But the fact is that regardless of a resolution — whether it is taken on the New Year or otherwise, most of them are broken for lack of a realistic goal setting.

The most common mistake while taking a resolution is that people usually decide to make very big change to their habits or they want to achieve too many goals at one time.

Some of them are very lousy and vague. For example, resolving to lose weight so as to receive more care and love from a spouse. This is like reaching for the stars without knowing the difficulty in reaching there. Once the glow of a new year wanes, many people struggle to make good on their plans.

According to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, only 46 per cent of people who made New Year’s resolutions were successful.

According to Timothy Pychyl, a psychology professor, resolutions are considered as a form of “cultural procrastination”, an effort to reinvent oneself.

People are not ready to change their habits, particularly bad habits, and that accounts for the high failure rate, he argues. Many people don’t make their own resolutions out of what’s most meaningful and desirable for them but they set it out of what other people told them they need to do out of fear or guilt. At the same time, as we shift to the new calendar, it will be good endeavour, if we do, to change our thoughts and attitude towards our fellow beings. Very often we avoid them, hate them. We are so selfish that we do not even know who our neighbours are.

In our efforts to earn more wealth we lose humanity! Rich or poor, wise or unwise, live as an honest human and leave behind an identity to the next generation. Let them admire your life.

Let us live happily in this New Year with our compatriots. Everyone can be happy in prosperity but to be happy in adversity is the real happiness. From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affects this!

Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.

The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes. Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others puts the mind at ease.

This gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. Do not forget that at the end of your life you will think for yourself, in what way you could spend every hour of the day that passed by. However, you will not be able to turn back the time.

So let our New Year resolution be in the same line that we will strive to be good fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.

Let this year and the new decade bring you much happiness, which will make all decisions made you successful.

Happy New Year to all our readers!

18samkutty@gmail.com