When a man enjoys bacon and fried eggs, that we call natural taste. When he enjoys raw beetroots and baby marrows, that we call acquired taste
In reflecting on what happiness has meant for me over the years, it surprises me how much it has changed. Walking in the rain today is awful, playing in the rain as a young boy was bliss! Getting dirty and all muddied is an unimaginable abomination, then it was a means to unrivalled pleasure. Then I would not ‘go calmly into the night’ there was always play and adventure yet to be finished. Life was exciting when it was unpredictable and spontaneous; today it is stress if it is not well ordered and predictable. Happiness is leaving nothing to chance in a carefully steered life!
I did not grow up with TV and cartoons and music and movies. I grew up with play and open fields; climbing and jumping, cutting grass and carrying water and tilling land and bits of reading. That was fun, it really was. Indoors were mundane and unwanted. The thrill was in being out there and proving something.
I will tell you the first thing I thought when I watched channel O (somewhere in high school), it was ridiculous. That was certainly not what I had associated with fun, leave alone adults. Listening to great adventures and heroism on national geographic was what I could have considered as exciting. That is the kind of stuff I thrived on as a little boy from old magazines and newspapers. The lavishness and extravagance and vulgarity were just too arbitrary, they lacked any context.
Of course I had never heard the word “Celebrity”, I had no clue about the massive entertainment industry with singers and actors who earned billions and an equal behemoth share of airtime and coverage on print media. I also did not know much about the elite sportsmen who were the role models for every young boy and girl. To be fashionable was to know these people, where they lived and who they related to and the car they drove and the jewelry they wore. To be a little like these people was the beginning of happiness.
I had to acquiescence myself to this new concept of happiness. I soon realized that this was the natural taste, mine was an acquired one. What I had admired all this time was nibbling at raw red cabbage and lettuce while sizzling hot dogs and omelets were waiting to be munched.
Growing up and getting so much more exposure and especially working in leisure industry has really influenced what I would think to be a successful life. What I have vaguely in my head is a little mansionnette in an upscale estate with a beautiful wife and cute kids, holiday twice a year and a compact car, going to the theater and walks in the park every so often!
But as I look back, without disparaging the pop culture and the expectations it puts on us, I get this big feeling there is so much more I am missing, or may be my sense of happiness ought to be slightly different. I get to see a lot of people who are happy, and not in the holidying and partying kind of way. They don’t necessarily have the bling or the lavishness, but they live happy cool lives. People who, where as they have not rejected the natural happiness, they have chosen the learned happiness. The money they would use in extravagant holidays, they put in supporting the less fortunate in a systematic way. The time they would spend relaxing and having fun, they prefer to invest in creating solutions to challenges they are not necessarily facing. Those who, instead of having a Friday night out, will prefer to immerse their minds in learning a new language or a new concept.
And with that in mind, I lament that probably I have received too much exposure to that which I can’t help but love; the so much drumming in my ears that fried bacon smells and tastes great. May be a little more effort should have been put to teach my palates to appreciate celery and the red cabbage. How to enjoy life in the more conservative ways; our challenge, I think, is not cutting down forests but watering the deserts.
And I fear our little children will grow with a similar inordinate exposure, or probably worse. Our role modeling will be skewed towards the glamorous professions they see on screen. The so many who will land on the “mortar and brick” professions will feel cheated or robbed off happiness. Like they have been consigned to a life of eating those yucky veges all their life!
Looking at the things I had learnt to love as a little boy, and from what I observe from families (mostly abroad) who have a lustrous history of military service, or business and entrepreneurship, there is as much to be happy and upbeat about in the less glamorous more mundane careers as in the public exciting lives of the celebrities. We can truly say like my great friend Lewis would put it “theirs is joy beyond all other, not because it is better than ours, but because all joy is beyond all other”. Just the same way the strict vegetarian will walk out of the restaurant full of praise after his salad; we walk out of our work stations with similar satisfaction.
May be some day we will rediscover the excitement of being a teacher or house wife or a farmer- living a normal happy life!
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