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If wishes were horses...
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May. 5th, 2008 | 12:47 pm
beggars would ride.
This is a piece of an old Scottish rhyme. It can be interpreted as - if wishing alone was enough, there would be no one short of anything in this world.
Well that leads me to ponder what else do we need to realize our wishes – besides of course a strong rooted wish itself? Hard work, some would say. Luck, others would say. Both – the large majority would say. The quest for happiness, I would say.
All our actions are directed towards discovering happiness and this indeed is the one universal wish. But we are different (or we ‘think’ we are). Our sources of happiness are different (or we think they are). This, I imagine, would culminate in multifarious chases – one for each of the oases of wealth, love, power, revenge, comfort and suchlike. People are in one race or the other at any phase in their lives. Sometimes our guess about ‘our’ source is right. At other times it is not. To err is human and we fail to understand what gives us true happiness. There are moments when we realize that we have been chasing a mirage or felt grateful that a wish did not ultimately come true as something bigger was in store for us. If I may quote from Forrest Gump – “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get”. This makes the activity of wishing look redundant. But the desire for eternal happiness keeps us going – we fall, rise, retreat, rebound, fail, thrive. This about sums up life in a nutshell.
This is a piece of an old Scottish rhyme. It can be interpreted as - if wishing alone was enough, there would be no one short of anything in this world.
Well that leads me to ponder what else do we need to realize our wishes – besides of course a strong rooted wish itself? Hard work, some would say. Luck, others would say. Both – the large majority would say. The quest for happiness, I would say.
All our actions are directed towards discovering happiness and this indeed is the one universal wish. But we are different (or we ‘think’ we are). Our sources of happiness are different (or we think they are). This, I imagine, would culminate in multifarious chases – one for each of the oases of wealth, love, power, revenge, comfort and suchlike. People are in one race or the other at any phase in their lives. Sometimes our guess about ‘our’ source is right. At other times it is not. To err is human and we fail to understand what gives us true happiness. There are moments when we realize that we have been chasing a mirage or felt grateful that a wish did not ultimately come true as something bigger was in store for us. If I may quote from Forrest Gump – “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get”. This makes the activity of wishing look redundant. But the desire for eternal happiness keeps us going – we fall, rise, retreat, rebound, fail, thrive. This about sums up life in a nutshell.