What is happiness? Philosophers are never the happy ones!
Those who find comfort in fancy food and attire are perhaps the happiest-
A warm plate of rice with two or three side dishes,
And a table full of closest people having a shared meal together.
Those who find comfort in a luxurious house are still happy,
A house filled with white artifacts, marble like tiles always glossy, full of quiet serenity,
And, marvellous decor screaming elegance.
A dim light is still burning in the hallway to keep the house awake-
As if it is waiting for somebody to enter.
Perhaps, happiness is still this simple-
To own house, cars and people.
Perhaps, happiness is this ordinary to belong and exhibit ownership.
We feel happy to show others what we have- perhaps, that's the life trajectory of most people.
But, some of us cannot simply lead an ordinary life.
We tend to seek meaning in every ordinary thing.
We eat a spoonful of rice and begin thinking about hunger,
How hungry might be the people out there?
We enter a room and start wondering who was left behind.
We are given a title and think whether it is ours,
We own a body and we ask why we are ashamed of how others judge it from afar.
We keep asking if body dysmorphia shapes our relationship with them.
We are given love and then we ask whether they would love us the same way they loved themselves back.
Back in the mind, the question keeps
Whether they would love us without the need to control or any ownership, without dwelling on their ego,
Crumbling their shgadow side, hiding in hindsight.
Even happiness becomes difficult
in the hands of the questioning.
You know when you ask too many questions,
You become inherently unhappy,
Yet, wise people encourage you to keep asking questions,
But, again, it's them rejecting your every notion.
The idea that you give is cancelled by another idea,
It's a perpetual process, perhaps, a progres- criticism are reflections of self-limitations,
But, again, you keep asking whether the critique is even justified or not a biased one based on other dimensions.
We look for subjectivity
where others find certainty,
We look for subjectivity where others are living their life peacefully in certainty,
We look for meaning even in insignificance,
Where others rotate their lives around routines.
We look for dignity where others have compromised themselves,
We search for value in small details.
And that's how we ruin everything that we have built by asking too many questions.
Then we complain: why do we lose everything that we have hardly gained?
We turn our grief into poetry,
Silence into sharp letters,
Withdrawal in lines,
Rejections in pages.
We transmute what we get back.
We try to give meaning to every trivial interaction.
We do not know how to simply suffer.
We do not know how to suffer quietly,
Even in suffering we need to find meaning.
Perhaps that is our peculiar unhappiness—
Perhaps, that is our peculiar unhappiness-
Not that we have less comfort in life,
But even comfort could not silence our revolting mind.
Still, sometimes late at night when the world gets quiet,
I envy the happy ones- the less sentimental ones.
Those who find happiness in luxury and comfort without reflecting on too much,
Those who can be themselves inside the softness of the ordinary life without questioning existence itself.
Maybe they have understood a simple equation to make their life simple-
that life doesn't always need a philosophy to be worthy.
Sometimes dignity means having your loved ones near,
Sometimes meaning means a non-judgmental social circle,
Sometimes value is having a place to fall back after wild chaos.
And, perhaps, the saddest lesson is,
While we were searching for meaning in every paragraph we read,
Questioning our existence and fighting with the spirits of wisdom,
Happiness quietly fled from the back door, and slipped away from our hands before we could even touch it.
It was waiting for us to keep quiet and stop questioning the simple things.
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian
Time Frame: 1.58 am, CDT, Lubbock, TX
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