The Carton of Happiness:

Take a sleepy man and put him on a roller coaster. What you get is the first year of fatherhood. The sleep won’t let you be active and the roller coaster won’t let you sleep. If at all you do, then what you get is an unbelievable mix of dreams and nightmares. And I stood exactly at that juncture, when I realized we were on the last three boxes of Lactogen. The carton stood empty. Vivaan was one!

And Viv had it all; from a tricycle he couldn’t yet ride to innumerable action hero figures, to cars and trucks. But nothing ever managed to hold his attention for more than a couple of hours. Every toy ultimately landed up in his storage bucket which the toys were soon outgrowing. When Viv was on the last few boxes of Lactogen, a brainwave hit me. Why not put his old toys into the empty carton? That should free up some space in our already cramped household. When I got the carton out, a very strange thing happened. Viv squealed with delight. He jumped right into the carton and got his favorite toys into it as well. To make things better for him, I tied a rope to the carton, and pulled him around. He had never been this happy with any of his toys.

On a regular day, on my way to work, the philosophical side of my brain got thinking. What was so wonderful about the ordinary cardboard carton that made Viv so happy? Why was it so much better than the other sophisticated and battery operated toys he had? Much deliberation saw me arriving at a very unusual answer. And the answer was simplicity. The complicated toys gave him little room to innovate. The truck had to be pushed in a particular way and the action figure had to be turned in a particular way. There was never the freedom to exercise his will. And that’s where the simple carton chipped in. It was a car, it was a chair or it could be anything that his mind could picture it to be!!

And we live our everyday life, wound up around complications. Working hard to solve problems while the best things in life are so simple. We run after material pleasures and ignore the simple everyday moments of happiness which life sprinkles around us. We want complicated toys to compare with peers. We want appreciations for having learnt how to handle complicated toys. But we fail to evaluate if these are actually achievements. An achievement need not always be complicated. We have conditioned ourselves to believe that anything simple cannot be interesting at all. And Viv in his innocent and uncomplicated mind could easily evaluate and rank the carton much above cars, trucks and heroes.

It would take come 'un'conditioning to see the simplicity in everyday lives. But I guess it should not be very difficult. If a child can do it, with his nascent neural ability, it should not be very difficult for us with 15 years of formal education. It should not be very difficult to realize, that true happiness lies in the carton and not in anything else.