The C.A.T. Principle – Global Ebook Awards GOLD & SILVER Winner for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook of 2014 & 2016

The Fountains of Brindavan Gardens. Photo by © Saiko3p | Dreamstime.com

Happiness: Life’s Eternal Fountain…

Are we losing the art of happiness? Is everything becoming too serious to be happy? Should we be happy at all given the amount of suffering and negativity in the world?

We in the West have had it pretty good, particularly since the end of World War II. Yes, there have been problems. We’ve had recessions, dissensions, convulsions, and even suppression, but taken as a whole, our lives are pretty good.

We’re not experiencing the anguish of wars, the upheavals of revolutions, nor the pain of loss the way so many places across the world do. That’s not to say we don’t experience loss, because we do. It’s not to say that pain can’t be a part of our daily lives, because it can. But all in all, the vast majority of Western nations enjoy a standard of living without parallel in history. And yet given our relative standing in the world, it seems that the West is slowly losing its ability to be genuinely happy.

Travel often brings new perspectives with it (see Travel: The Door to New Horizons…) and some years ago I had the good fortune to journey to India to visit a client’s corporate headquarters there. Anyone who’s been to the Asian subcontinent can attest to the contrasts that a visitor confronts in this vast area of more than one billion people. My client was kind enough to show me his company’s offices and its main training center, but more than anything, it was a non-corporate event that indelibly left a mark upon me.

It was a warm April evening when, with my client, his wife and his son, we paid a visit to the base of the Krishna Raja Sagara Dam by the city of Mysore in the State of Karnataka. It’s there that the Garden of Brindavan is to be found, and it’s at the north end of this magnificent garden that a spectacular dancing water fountain performs a daily evening illumination show.

The show was remarkable, but something I found even more remarkable was the happiness with which hundreds of locals arrived to experience this wonderful fountain. People slowly streamed in and gathered around the concrete pad harboring the water-filled jets. There was no pushing, shoving or yelling, but instead the friendly faces of babies, children, parents and grandparents awaiting the nocturnal display of dazzling lights and dancing aqua. One could see that most didn’t derive from affluence, but on the contrary probably knew a lot of hardship. And yet one would have been hard pressed to find an unappreciative soul there that night.

My mind often returns to this evening. It makes me wonder how it’s the simple things in life that matter, and not the material things that we often become obsessed with. Doubtless, they’re a necessary part of existence and there’s nothing amok with wanting to strive to do better, but in the end it’s the journey that counts. It’s not the bigger house, the bigger car, or the bigger wallet that’s the cure to end all our misgivings, but rather the happiness derived from understanding what truly matters. The people by the fountain that night understood this.

They understood that happiness is a choice; it comes from within. They understood that when chosen, it’s life’s eternal fountain…

For more check out the Global Ebook Awards GOLD & SILVER Winner of 2014 & 2016, The C.A.T. Principle: Change, Action, Trust – Words to Live By available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. See the latest Amazon reviews here.

Sign up above and receive this blog once every two weeks to your inbox. Comments and thoughts welcome.

A 2014 Global Ebook Awards GOLD Winner for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook.

A 2016 Global Ebook Awards SILVER Winner for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook.