Man Khushaal Hastam - من خوشحال هستم

Today, I asked Zarminey (6year old Afghani green-eyed beautiful girl outside The Forum Mall) what happiness meant to her. She just blankly stared back. I repeated again, and again. She just couldn't understand. I was surprised. Because she's the most talkative person I know after me. She finally shrugged her shoulders and cracked a joke about the guard picking his nose.

And that's when I got my answer.

There are two kinds of happiness in this world.

One is natural, innate. The one we're born with. It’s a natural state of mind. Just like we're breathing, our heart's beating; similarly, we're naturally in a state of happiness/contentment. However, the more we acquire materialistic possessions (beyond our needs), we drift away from this natural state. We start limiting happiness. We start drawing its boundaries. And before we realize, we have confined happiness/contentment in complicated paradigms. We have put in stereotypes and conditions. We have attached strings to it. We have drawn a line between what makes us happy and what doesn't.

And that confined state of mind is called illusion of happiness. Wherein, we feel bouts of happiness after acquiring every next materialistic possession. Those moments are nothing but a mere mirage of happiness drenched in materialistic achievements.

Yearning to make those moments of pleasure last, we hop from acquiring one materialistic achievement to another, only to experience the collapse of mirage after every few moments. Every single time, our mirage breaks. We misread our strength to fight. And so, we leap to another possession, in the false hopes of achieving lasting pleasure. It is like expecting to stay alive on the ventilator till death.

With every hop away from nature, we move away from the real happiness. It is the natural state of mind. It can't be described. The definition for real happiness doesn't depend on worldly adjectives and conditions. It is just there. In you. In me. In everyone. It is essential for your survival. For my survival. Our mind might fool us; but our organs, every single one of them is still thriving on this very sense of contentment/happiness.

We were born with it. It is the only True Feeling.

Asking Zarminey what happiness meant to her is asking a human what breathing means to him.

Playing with her dupatta and giggling away, I asked her to teach me how to express happiness in Persian. She smiled and said “Man Khushaal Hastam” [  من;خوشحال هستم] and in that sentence somewhere, she taught me how to breathe again.