How Little Suffices For Happiness

I've had two very different things teach me the very same lesson recently. I'm reading Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankel, he was a physcotherapist and it's a story of his struggle through the holocaust, more significantly a physcologist view from inside the prison bars at the worst concentration camps. Through his desperate situation he found not only hope but even laughter and bliss! He says...
"What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us."

More importantly he talks about love and how it's so simple to miss the point when in striving for an unattainable objects to bring us happiness we forget that love and love alone is more powerful than material things; furthermore we forget that the embodiment of that love is in our families, closest friends, and in our God. All of these are free, and most people miss this simple point. He says, "Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love." This comes from a man dying of starvation and ridden with lice, edema, and typhus.

The same day that I read this I met with Shriram again and through a few of his stories I realized he was getting at the very same message! He wrote this and I want to share it with you...

How Little Suffices For Happiness

by Shriam Jaiswad
Our happiness is not depended upon riches of the world. If we are going to be really happy then even a simple thing can bring us joy. A child on the sea shore playing with a heap of sand is much happier than a king clinging to a heap of gold.

He had written many sort stories with the moral of love being free and yet priceless. He condemns the greedy politicians and rich brahmin families for their materialistic hording of India's wealth. He even wrote in a story titled The 5 Rupee Note where he mentions how when children find a spare moment in time where they have nothing to do they play, oppositely when an adult has nothing to do he broads over the past and complains about what can be better in his life.
A wonderful and beautiful girl names Sara, from England came to the school yesterday to visit. We talked for hours (I even had to cancel my English classes) and I showed her the temples, ruins, and she wanted to meet Shriram. While there, as usual, he complained about his health and how he has never done anything significant with his life. After a couple of hours of reading his stories, talking, and tea we headed out the gate and he thanked several times for our time. Sara turned around a said "I know you realize you don't have much time left on this earth, but don't forget your own advice. " He asked her what she meant by this and she told him that although he is an adult he should never stop playing. He smiled and we walked away without another word.

It's such a basic lesson and we've all heard it before. Love, whether for you wife, your God, or your family...love is the only way to happiness, hope and even bliss. If something in our life is not driven by love, drive it out before in takes up roots and becomes a permanent blight eating away at our happiness and our youth.