Capturing happiness

I love writing. I feel as though I go into a different world when I write. The world becomes tiny, contains just me, my laptop, and my fingers that move on their own accord converting my thoughts into text on screen. With increasing responsibilities of running a startup, my writing has become rare. My friend commented that I seem to be writing only when I lose someone I love. When I looked at my last few blogs, I realized that she was right. I wrote when I lost my aunt, or my adopted dad, or when something made me really sad. That got me thinking about where the inspiration comes from. I realized that I have been writing only when the pain has been so great that there was no other escape except through words. I feel that I need to find the same inspiration from happiness as well. Else, there is a danger of mistaking pain as an essential ingredient for inspiration. 

There is this unspoken understanding that true creativity comes from pain, bad relationships, occasional drugs, and definitely a painful childhood. Does this mean that those who have regular lives, who had an uneventful, happy childhood cannot be creative? NOT TRUE. So, here is what we regulars, who want to belong to the “creative” class, need to do. We need to learn to derive as much inspiration from happiness as we do from sadness. The issue with happiness is that we take it so for-granted that we don’t let it overflow. I think that we need to record every moment of happiness and let it stick. When I look back at what I record, I don’t want to have memories of only what gave me sadness. I want to record those happy small moments that go unnoticed in the same way I record my moments of sadness. So, here is one such moment for me...

I was driving my car and noticed that the tire signs were lit, which means that something is wrong with the tires. The first thing that I wanted to check was the air in the tires. I have a confession to make. I have been driving for almost 30 years but I do not know how to even check the air in the tires. I pulled over at a gas station and asked a young man, who was working in the garage to help me. He asked me to pull over at the Full service station, checked the tire pressure and pumped in some air and made sure that I was okay. He went out of his way to help and did not make a big deal of it. As I was digging into my purse to bring out some money to tip him, he gave me a wonderful smile and walked away to his work. It’s not that he did not want to wait but it did not even occur to him to ask for a tip. In that moment, I felt really grateful for finding someone who was so gracious. It is such a small moment that it would have totally been lost in another day or two. But, by publicly recording it, I have given it a permanent place to boost up my happiness quotient.