With the rush and constant chasing of new frontiers of life, there often comes a moment when we fail to acknowledge the beauty and essence of what we already have.
There is a cute little story on how we fail to realise our own worth. A magician called upon a person and made a 10-rupee note disappear from his pocket. The person thought that he would get his money back after the show but that did not happen. By the time the show got over, the man grew impatient and went straight to the magician to enquire about his note.
Seeing the sad, dejected face of the person, the magician returned his note and asked, “Are you happy, now?” “Yes, content and happy,” the man replied.
“Did you notice, you haven’t gained anything more than what you had come here with? The only change occurred is that now you are going out with a cheerful face and not with a long one with which you had entered this place,” the magician enquired. “Yes, I understand, our source of happiness lies within us; we need not look for it anywhere else,” the man exclaimed.
“Yes, it’s not that you were not happy earlier, you were. But earlier just because you did not acknowledge the value of what you already possessed, you had also failed to notice your happiness,” said the magician.
{{/usCountry}}“Yes, it’s not that you were not happy earlier, you were. But earlier just because you did not acknowledge the value of what you already possessed, you had also failed to notice your happiness,” said the magician.
{{/usCountry}}That is it. We always want to have more and more of everything without realising that we already have enough to be happy, but we keep harbouring the false notion that we are just one ‘thing’ away from our happiness. And we get entangled with this thought forever, just replacing our demands every time.
It’s in our interest that from time to time we willfully cut ourselves off from the humdrum of our daily life and stop taking a note of everything that we have or have gained with pain and effort, and thus appreciate a thing for its intrinsic value.