Making Happiness the Longest Line of Life

There is a platitude about a long line versus a short line - a riddle which asks you to decrease the length of a line without erasing it. The answer lies in drawing a long line against this line, which automatically makes the first line look shorter in length. It is actually that simple, you just need to draw another line parallel to the original line if you want to decrease its length without erasing it.

These lines play a major role in our life as we keep drawing these lines unconsciously in our day-to-day life too. How and when do we do so?

Translating these two lines to our life, we can see that anger becomes the long line of our life when we let it overpower our very self. It starts to dominate our existence and also our peace of mind. Our life immediately turns into the short line compared to our anger, pride, ego, greed, and fear when we let these emotions grow into a larger than life status.

As a result, we unknowingly turn the crux of our life, which is love, happiness and peace, into the short line without erasing it. Are we doing justice to our life? No, we are not. We are letting love and happiness become the most neglected short line of our life. This needs to change and we need to bring about that change.

This calls for the need to define the lines of our life for our own happiness. The goal of life for each individual may differ but the ultimate goal for all is happiness. Many would try to equate happiness to success or to wealth but each one is striving to be happy, be it through the pinnacle in their career or by amassing wealth. The final underlying need is happiness which we try to look for in our outward world. 

The priority in life lies in having happiness as the long line of our life. All other emotions have to be content as being the shorter lines of our life. We have to increase our inner peace and happiness to make that as the longest line of our life. Happiness lies within us and not in the materialistic world, we have to discover it, nurture it, and enhance it. The lines of anger and other restraining emotions will need to be made as short as possible.

 

(Excerpt from my book Taming Anger Constructively)