Happiness – Page 3 – Ramblings of a Monk

It’s interesting when we think about how we often talk about pursuing happiness in life bla bla blah, when in real life, no one will quite answer “I’m pursuing happiness” when asked “What are you pursuing in life right now?”.

When I meet some new people, I like to ask them “What do you do?”. They would then tell me they are in whatever trade or profession they are in. When I ask them “What you are doing these days?”, they would reply with a gist of whatever projects or activities they are currently engaged in.

When you ask them what they hope to see happen in their life 10 to 20 years later, maybe some will say marriage, a good career etc etc, depending on their age, direction in life and so on. I’ve yet to meet someone who would tell me, they are “pursuing happiness” right this moment.

Maybe it’s because you cannot just go to the mall to get it. Or that it’s so intangible. While you are experiencing it, you barely think about it, when you loose it, then you realise its absence! Nevertheless, I would like to suggest this, for you and everyone to do this for yourself: Make a choice to be happy!

Now I am not suggesting for us to start making yet another wishlist of “If I have XYZ I would be happy”, but to start making a different list this time. This time, make a list that says “Whether or not I get XYZ, I will choose to be happy!”. 🙂

Later on, I’ll suggest some ways for staying happy regardless of outcome XYZ, in the mean time, feel free to share your thoughts and comments.

See also The Mathematics of Happiness

When I first learnt about Probability Theory in secondary school, I went nuts! I fell in love with it, as it seemed almost magical that we could somehow synthesize or calculate the probability of something happening! I feel like I’m a psychic! Boy, was it fun finding out that the chance of a ‘1’ occurring from an unbiased dice was 1/6 or 0.1666666… 6667… or that the chance of even numbers occurring was 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 or 3/6 or 1/2. Ok, it is intuitive to arrive at 0.5 or half, but the maths behind it is the marvel.

The other thing that was fun about probability was that there were the card games. It seem like many math teachers are very into card games as many questions revolves around the probability “of drawing the next Ace from the deck, given a certain hand that was already played”. I half guess that this obsession with cards might have stem from the poor financial status of teachers in general. Literature and linguistic teachers will poke fun at the social rich strata while the mathematicians will dream about striking it rich by winning at this weekend’s poker game or blackjack! Of course, there are the boring apple and oranges in a bag questions and red and blue marbles questions, but those are for kids and no one got rich guessing apples and oranges or marbles!

Tag: Happiness

Making the Choice to be Happy

The Mathematics of Happiness