Bytes of bliss

Bytes of bliss

July 2016

By Fatema Diwan

The magenta sky overhead, the contentment I felt whilst looking at it and this book seemed perfectly in sync with each other. We human beings are obsessed with finding our Zen, our happiness; something that this book addresses and attempts to aid.

Consisting of an assortment of quotes by authors and intellectuals cherished by one of India’s most popular writers, plus some golden words penned by the man himself, it mentions that happiness differs from person to person. Nothingness, for example, could be feared by a teenager who longs for colour, zeal, getting in with the right people and achieving momentum, while to the monk in the monastery, it could mean the epitome of peace and tranquillity, something that he has striven for all his life and has finally achieved. A line that really sung to me was this “Until death comes, all is life.” Waiting has been an essential part of our mortal journey. We wait for the right person, the right teacher, the right time… Goodness, we even diet until the end of the week in order to wait in line for the new high-end dessert shop in town. So after reading this 159-page anthology, this is the promise I’ve made to myself – more living, less waiting. My second favourite excerpt would be this: “Happiness always lingers with unhappiness. They are two sides of the same coin. When the whole coin drops from your hand you are neither happy nor unhappy.” Classic Osho.

“All of man’s miseries stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal. Something else that really struck me while reading this was the understanding of the distinction between loneliness and solitude. The distinction is this – acceptance. How often have we dreaded the feeling of being alone or secluded, how often have we immersed ourselves into work, into meaningless conversations with people who we’d otherwise never talk to? But when you accept the empty chair across you during dinner time, when you accept the call that never came, or reading out loud to an empty room – you realise that it takes just one person to make you happy, and that person is you. It’s a comforting read on a Sunday afternoon or even when you just feel like flipping through the pages until your eye meets the words that make your heart smile.