Desi Anwar: Homemade Misery

Iam writing this article in Val d’Isere, a ski resort in France, which, at this time of the year and with the current snowy weather, is quite breathtakingly beautiful.

Of course it’s cold, but the air is crisp and fresh. Moreover, this little snow-covered town that looks like something straight out of a Christmas card has now gone eco-friendly. That’s one of the reasons I’m here — to get away from my hometown’s tropical humidity, polluted air and road congestion and give my lungs and limbs a much-needed break. After all, a change, as they say, is as good as a rest. And I’m the type of person who prefers to spend my holidays up to my ears in activities, however challenging and exhausting, rather than sit around doing nothing under the pretext of relaxing — which, I hasten to say, is my recipe for getting stressed and cranky.

Indeed, it’s hard to feel down or harassed when your are surrounded by the most amazing mountain ranges, especially when it costs practically an arm and a leg just to get here, and then the other arm and leg to really take advantage of all those groomed pistes. After all, to experience this type of getaway requires careful planning, not to mention some luck with the weather.

So when a married couple sitting at a table adjacent to mine during lunch spent most of their ski break bickering and arguing with each other (while their teenage daughter seemed quietly resigned to their parental dynamics), I began asking myself what generates happiness and whether happiness is really the aim of everybody’s life.

I surmised from the age of the daughter that the couple had most likely been married for at least 15 years. Perhaps their marriage was on the slippery slope toward a sour divorce (which would not be surprising considering the amount of contempt they seemed to have for each another), with only their love for their offspring keeping them together.

However, it might also have been that each of them took particular delight in putting the other one down and trying to outdo each other in meanness. Perhaps this constant arguing and quarrelling was actually cementing their relationship. After all, I’ve seen many married couples who cannot even bring themselves to speak to each other during dinner in restaurants, preferring instead to pointedly ignore the other in some kind of emotional torture, or out of boredom or simply because they have nothing to say.

In which case even the most delightful and exotic place will not change their state of being or fill them with joy. It’s as if they have packed their daily emotional and mental baggage along with their winter jackets and woolly hats and brought them along on holiday. No doubt they could have had similar arguments sitting at home in front of the television, though minus the complaints about how expensive everything was. Instead of feeling blessed that they were able to afford a holiday in such a nice place, they brought their misery with them, infecting those unfortunate enough to be in their proximity.

I think most of us know through experience that true happiness is not a possession or a fleeting emotion. Desire for possessions (whether things, experiences or people) is momentary, as are our emotions, which by their very nature are transient and changeable, often without any clear reason. The wise say that happiness is a state of mind manifested in our attitude and in how we view the world. It is not in the things that happen to us but in the meaning we find in those things and how it makes us feel about ourselves.

We can be surrounded with so much beauty and blessed with abundance and good health and yet still be dogged with constant dissatisfaction and our own homemade misery.

And yet, strangely enough, when witnessing disasters like the earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday, underlying the sadness and the tragedy, many of us discover stirrings within that are seldom felt. Feelings that manifest themselves in the desire to share, to help, to give and to show our solidarity in whatever way we can and in gestures that perhaps have more meaning to ourselves than those whom we help.

Perhaps this then is the true meaning of happiness — not in the amazing things that we do, but whether we do it with compassion. Not in fine possessions, but the value they have when we share them with others. Nor in the brilliance of our minds, but in the quality and clarity of our thoughts.

Desi Anwar is a senior anchor and writer. She can be contacted at www.desianwar.com and www.dailyavocado.net.

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