Spice of Life | Valuing the first step to happiness we all seek

A few days ago, while having dinner at my uncle’s home, I began talking about my visit to Lake Tahoe, one of the largest and most celebrated lakes in North America that straddles the border of California and Nevada. My uncle instantly compared it with our village pond and said: “I had visited the lake in the ’90s. It seemed like a pond to me, a bit larger than the one here in the village. It wasn’t worth it.” How could one make such a comparison, I wondered, but didn’t question him, thinking everyone has their own way of looking at the world around them.

Within a New York minute, I was reminded of another such conversation from my first-ever visit to Toronto not so long ago. My cousin and I had just shared with her grandmother that we would be going to Niagara Falls but her response amused and astounded us at the same time. “Why do you want to visit a fall? It’s just the water falling. I don’t understand why everyone wants to see the water coming down,” she said in an irked tone.

The words of my uncle and this grandmother, however, prove that they failed to see the magic and beauty of both these natural wonders, simply because they didn’t value them. When we value something, we end up catching the goodness, besides tasting many fruits, and this works for everything, be it health, relationships, career, dreams, and whatever one can think about. Unfortunately, most of us value something only when it is no more with us. Do we ever give importance to the present until it turns into the past?

Today, we may be bombarded with many facilities offering us so much convenience, but where’s the gratitude? Instead, we remain dissatisfied and are always complaining. There was a time when pleasure was drawn from one or two TV channels but even if we have hundreds of channels now, many of us label them boring. We have the latest mobile phone in hand, but there’s always a desire to buy the next model and the process continues. This is because we don’t value what we already have. Haven’t we spoiled ourselves?

True happiness comes to us only when we possess the virtue of valuing something and it should begin from life’s little joys, the simple pleasures of everyday life. This reminds me, and I’m elated it did, of my uncle’s cheerful octogenarian neighbour, Janet Honcoop, from Lynden, Washington, who would sit in her garden every afternoon, especially when it would be time of my cousin’s school van’s arrival. “I chose that time because I love to see the smile of your son as he gets down the van. It’s beautiful and I can feel his joy of returning home,” she once shared with my uncle.

According to my experience, valuing something also opens doors for us. When I was in school, I valued the English language, though I could have chosen to ignore it like many of my classmates did. They even discouraged me from taking interest in it but truly this language has inundated me with beautiful opportunities. The gift of writing in English is one of them. It’s made my life so intriguing. The joy it offers can’t be expressed in words but I can feel it. Love something and it will love you back – I have realised.

Coming to the core beauty of valuing, it instantly leads one to satisfaction, followed by gratitude and eventually to the state of happiness, which we all desperately seek. In other words, it’s a process which works step by step, beginning strictly with the virtue of valuing. Without it, everything will seem dull or say in every tunnel, we would fail to find any light.

The writer is an Amritsar-based freelance contributor and can be reached at rameshinder.sandhu@gmail.com.