Are you not happy in your life?...

Are you not happy with what is happening in your life? And you are not even aware that you are not happy?

Read on....

Being 'Not Happy' is different from being 'Unhappy'. When you are unhappy you know it, probably your family and friends know it too. But when you are 'Not happy', perhaps even you are not aware. Your life will be coasting along, fitted into neat little blocks - Morning activities, Going to office, come back, watch some TV, go to sleep... The cycle continues.

No time for reflection, no time for self development. No time to realize that you are not happy.

It may take only very small adjustments to your life style to reverse that and become genuinely happy. Perhaps you are not even aware that the solution is out there. 

I can give an example from the world of cooking.

I am a Tambram. Dosa is our favorite food. My mom, like all Tambram women, loves making dosas.

Dosa

Dosas are made in a frying pan, known as 'Dosa Kallu' or 'Dosa Tawa'. The batter is poured and flattened on the pan and fried with little oil. For a long time, over three to four years, my mother was using the same pan. It was contorted in some places but it was working. It was producing the expected result. She might have had to pour little more oil than necessary, but she attributed that to her style of Dosa making.

She was not unhappy, mind you. She had made thousands of Dosas in that pan.

Dosa Batter being flattened on a Dosa Kallu

In the meantime, the technology had evolved in the making of frying pan. New materials and kitchen friendly pans were out there in the market. She was aware of these but did not feel the need for change. 

Three weeks ago,, we decided to exchange the old pan with a new one. 

In the new pan, dosas are coming out awesome. They are more flatter and hence more crisper, they pop out of the pan with the least amount of effort, the dosas that come out have that beautiful captivating golden brown hue that make you crave for a dozen of them, those new year resolutions be damned! They are crisp as a piece of glass but melt like butter as soon as they are in your mouth. 

If 'Dosa making' were an Olympic event, my mom would win a gold for India.

Boy, is my mom happy!!. You bet she is. She is ecstatic. She can't stop raving about the new 'Dosa Kallu'. It needs less heat, less batter for a bigger flatter dosa, less oil..... And because it uses less oil, the dosas are healthier. And less oil produce less fumes and so they are soft on the chimney too...

The smile on her face as she serves Dosas is priceless...

Till now she was not happy and she did not know that she was not happy. That all changed with the new 'Dosa Kallu'. Now she is genuinely happy. Her quality of life has gone up. 

A new frying pan. That is all it took.

Another small example from my personal life. Every morning I would like to prepare my morning cuppa. It could be java or it could be the good old chai. I love the feeling of washing the sauce pan,  pouring in the right amount of water and milk, adding the right amount of sugar (may be a teeny bit more !!) and tea, lighting the stove and watching it brew.

I have been using the same sets of pans for over the last five years. Over the years, the pans have developed small issues. The handle is heavier than the pan in one case. So every time I keep the empty pan on the stove, it falls down due to the weight of the handle.  The handles had broken in one or two of them, screws were missing in another, the handles had become loose in some others....

Every time I prepare tea, I had to use external support to lift the hot pan. Sometimes I use the cloth and burn my fingers (ever so lightly, but hurts all the same), pour hot tea and scald my fingers at others or sometimes spill on the ground which adds the effort to clean. 

I never bothered. It was working. That is all it mattered.

This changed last week when I got new handles fitted in all of them. Man, my tea making experience has undergone a transformation. Now while making tea, I love the feeling as I pick up the pan and give it a couple of tilts to mix the concoction. Earlier I used to do it with spoon and I had to wash it  after use. The feeling of cold water falling on your hand early morning while washing the spoon is very irritating. I love the feeling of tilting the pan to pour the tea on to my cup. The handles have rekindled and reinvigorated my love for tea making. 

Nowadays, I am genuinely happy as I prepare my tea. I never knew I was not happy till I fitted those handles.

A new frying pan brought happiness in my mom's life. New handles on sauce pans made tea making exciting for me. In the case of both of us, we were not unhappy with the status quo. But we were not happy.

Big difference.

So, try bringing small improvements to your life. As a first step, focus on the physical. Replace the bulb or tube light that is not working. Replace those cups with broken handles. Replace the old stuff with the new. For example, just by replacing a light bulb that was getting fused regularly with a brighter LED lamp has lowered the electricity consumption and brought smiles (the light is brighter) in my mom's face...

So simple, no?