We had Personality Development sessions in our first sem. During the introduction, the faculty, being spiritual, was trying to give us some fundas. Though I was genuinely uninterested, he said something which made me sit up and take notice. He said, “The mantra for happiness is a single word-ACCEPT. The root cause of all our unhappiness is that we don't accept people the way they are but want them to be as per our specifications."
I gave it a lot of thought and came to the conclusion that he was wrong. The mantra,as per me would be "ACCEPT & DON'T EXPECT". We have so many expectations from all the people around us. We expect our parents to give us money whenever we want, we expect our friends to be around always for us & tolerate us, we expect our better halves to be always with us, and so on...
All these expectations are from our perspective without thinking about others. This leads us to disappointments when these expectations are not met,making us unhappy. We blame them for not matching up to our 'expectations’, for no fault of theirs.
If we try and reduce our expectations and accept our loved ones- in fact-all the people around us as they are, life would be much simpler. No expectations, no heartburns. Acceptance will make us forgive them even if they are wrong.
Now, though I am preaching this, I will be honest enough to admit that I am finding it difficult to practise. I have been trying it, but have been largely unsuccessful and, in some cases-quite spectacularly so.
In whatever few cases I have succeeded, it has given me peace of mind. So, I am trying hard to work on this. Only when I achieve 100% success will I be able to walk up to my Prof and tell him to modify his mantra.
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