To be or not to be, happy !

This is very well a follow-up post on my previous post about happiness. I guess its becoming my habit to write follow-up posts.


This time as well it is triggered by someone’s status message about happiness. It said “Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket”. I am a firm believer of that. Those of you who know me well would be able to easily recognize that I do stupid, crazy things just because I wanted to do it that way and didn't want to change it for someone else. My lunch-mates know how much I trouble them not to have food in Andhra mess near the office.


Suddenly I see myself not very happy with the way things are going on. The difference is due to my job. I was very happy about my work as a developer, no silly mistakes, in fact very few mistakes. But in Technical Assurance in simple words donkey-work I’m not yet confident. It is about getting work done from someone you don’t even know and in a much higher position than you.


I have now got very high respect for all those secretaries who plan the meetings for their superiors so well. I see that it is complex and takes longer time to get a meeting arranged than the actual work that is decided to be done in that meeting.


With people of different cultures, the style of work, the way they use the infrastructure, even the simplest thing becomes very complicated. At the end of the day if I get the meeting arranged and got the information and documented it, that is a good day at work. When that doesn't happen, its a total mess. So I tend to kind of feel bad about not getting it done, simply put “not happy” about it.


Even though I know that I couldn’t have done much about it I get to feel unhappy. Does this mean that I have my happiness based on someone else? Literally, yes. Actually, not quite.


Still the difference can be made by accepting that its not my fault and letting it go. A typical mind immediately accepts “its not your fault” and have seen it many times with myself in the earlier times. I personally don’t like “its not my fault”. And letting it go is the most difficult for me. I tend to think “What better could have been done?”. But I think that is where finding room for improvement makes us unhappy. I still can’t decide staying unhappy is right or not in this case.


I remember someone saying “the food that tastes very good and giving you pleasure when its on your tongue is going to spoil your body most of the times”. Similarly if we are happy at work for a long time, we are going to be in a major trouble sooner or later. Anyway, I believe I have spent enough time in this world to understand that all days aren't sunny days.


Let me see, I hope that in the near future I will be happy about what I’m doing again. For those of you who stay in your comfort zone for a long time, please try to get out of it as early as possible.


Oh yeah, I still remember “No one wants advice, only corroboration”.