Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
“It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore
You may not be happy because you choose not to be happy!
The statement above may sound wrong. After all, who, in their right mind, would choose to be unhappy!? Or it may appear to lack empathy for those who are visibly in relatively more difficult circumstances.
Is it possible that one might mis-define “happiness” in a way that makes it not only unattainable but also undesirable since such a pursuit might even produce the opposite of the intent connoted by the word?
Can you find happiness in a hairball?
Human beings are immensely creative. We have solved many problems and invented many many things over the centuries. Creativity is clearly a major strength.
The irony is that our strength could hold within it the potential for a weakness that could lead to a self-destruction that eclipses any benefits that arise from the strength. If we look, it will not be hard to find examples of our creations that do do us harm, sometimes immeasurably so.
One of our foundational creations is language, which gives us a medium for even further creativity, so that we can create a parallel universe based on words, some elements of which are doubtlessly helpful in grasping some aspects of the complex and infinite world we live in. But the very same medium also enables us to create fantasies populated with unicorns, demons, reptile-haired gorgons and such. And, as the famed Man of La Mancha used to, we can skillfully persuade ourselves that the windmills around are our archenemies, driving us to go forth valiantly on our steeds, lance in hand, to vanquish these dastardly foes.
And so, we use our words to create faithful images of things that exist as an artist of nature might. On the other hand, and, perhaps, even more predictably, we wax Picassoesque and paint grotesque things that bear no resemblance to anything living or dead or which will ever exist. And which fill us with terror, anger, and other emotions which impassion us to chase mirages. These strange and intractable things tangle together inextricably with the not-so-alien things with real-word parallels: things such as pencils and paper and shoes and ships. The curse is not so much that there are all these nonsensical things; it is that there are things that make sense that are hopelessly tangled up with the nonsense. This is the hairball!
Take “me” out to the hairball game!
The hairball of nonsensical fiction is bad enough. But there is one genre of fiction embedded in it which is particularly subversive to our existence. And that is the notion of “me”. More fantasy stories have been written about this mythical creature than about anything else in the universe. The same logic and linguistic gymnastic abilities inherent in our curse of creativity, and which allows us to create the hairball, also endows us with the power to compound the hairball with a “me”.
It is not that there is no “me”. There is. And this “me”, again, is nature’s gift to us. We are endowed not only with this entity but also, along with it, the insatiable urge to preserve it and keep it alive for its lifetime: an urge that kicks in whenever danger so much as hints at its presence. Alas, this gift too brings an attendant curse with it! Hidden within what is undeniably a strength is also a capability to protect ourselves not from lions and sharks, but from the windmills seen by the Quixote within us.
Worse, thanks to our creative storytelling abilities, since the “me” we seek to preserve and protect is likely not the “Me” that is the gift of nature, our resources and efforts may be grossly misplaced, making them unavailable for what may really be in our self-interest.
Stress is not happiness!
So, we and the co-creators of the story of our existence – the hair-me mess — are driven by a strong compulsion to do something to bring this tumbleweed-like aberration under our control, much as the valorous Don Quixote did.
And try as we may, using whatever microscopes and instruments we can outfit ourselves with, we can’t unentangle the “hair-me mess”, for we can’t figure out where the illusory “me” is, where the stories about the universe are, and what part of this unholy mess is something even remotely real. All this is, to put it mildly, a source of considerable stress for the harried Quixote.
If we see that the stress – and therefore the feeling of unhappiness — is a product of the gift-curse of our creativity, maybe it becomes clearer that many forms of unhappiness really arise from some place inside us.
Is it possible to avoid writing fantasy fiction that torments? Is it worth considering shrinking the “me”, and redefining it to something closer to what nature created? Is it possible to exercise the gift of creativity to write useful non-fiction, and studiously delete the fictional “me” from these stories, as far as possible? And, say, with grace to the universe: “It’s not you. It’s me!”
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. [email protected].
