Synthetic Happiness

Can happiness be synthesized ?

[ Human beings can actually have experiences in their heads before they can happen to them in real life. They can feel mortal fear and get drenched in sweat even before the cause has materialised. This is a trick that none other animals have. _ Dan Gilbert ]

Today, as I was completing my second lap in the jogging park, I felt a sudden shortness of breath, and had a nasty cough. I was worried because this nasty cough was persisting for more than two weeks now – waking me from my sleep, cutting my breath halfway on the stairs.
At my age, with fifteen years of Diabetes, it always provokes sinister thoughts. None the less, I was happy.

Because, 6 months back, I had to stop suddenly in my second lap, here at the same place. A sudden pain and swelling of my right knee had put me in bed for more than one month. I was unable to sit on the toilet, or fold my knee. Then also I used to wake up half way in sleep just like today, only to manually pull my painful leg into comfortable position. I was mortally afraid of being disabled for the rest of my life.

My knee was bursting with fluid and doctors thought it must go under the arthroscope or the surgeon’s knife. Luckily, after several MRIs and thigh exercises, the knee became miraculously painless without any surgery. I never expected I can walk so soon.

So today, as I panted for that whip of breath halfway, in my second lap and was coughing non stop for the rest of lap, I was happy non the less.

Because that three pounds of grey matter, between my two ears, that greatest simulator, that had once synthesized a morbid fear of disability six months back, here in this park at this very spot, is in a different mode today.

It has reframed the pain against that earlier one and has synthesized happiness instead.

Whatever may your future bring, you can always synthesize happiness in your frontal lobe by reframing.

I have seen a colleague who had lost his youthful son tragically in a swimming pool years ago, has now become the soul of our get together parties. You only have to see him to believe how happy one can be.

Yes, today, I realized that happiness can be synthesized, the sooner the better.