There is a small story. A person was sitting with his friends. He was very sad. His friends asked him what happened. He said my shoes hurt me a lot. They said, then change the shoes. He said, I can’t. They asked, why? He said I am already very disturbed. The friends felt strange. They asked what you mean by that. He said, my daughter was in love with a drunkard and recently they got married. My wife is fighting with cancer. I am in a debt. Friends said then you must change the shoes immediately. At least one trouble will be solved. He said I can’t do that because every evening when I go to home and remove the shoes, I feel very relaxed and happy. It’s the shoes that give me pleasure.
Like this story, we link our pleasure with pain. We are not happy because something is there to be happy about. We conditioned ourselves to be happy if there is no pain. But is it possible that pain doesn’t exists at all? We have focused ourselves so much on the pain that if there is really something which can give us pleasure, we are not fully happy because the pain exists. We can’t enjoy the moment of pleasure because of it. When we continuously focus on pain, the pain will increase because unconsciously we are attracting it.
All the time we try to find the happiness but we succeed a very little because we are not finding the happiness; we are just trying to remove the pain. So in real we are in search of pain so that we can remove it and be happy. In this process we start identifying those things as pain which are not suitable to us or the situations, we are not comfortable with, and put all our time and energy to get out of it.
There is always something in life which is not suitable to us. There will be painful incidents and painful moments. Sometimes they are not controllable. Time is the only solution to get out of some problems. If we are not happy because something painful exists, we will never be happy. Today if one problem is over, another will come tomorrow. We should condition our mind to be happy even when the pain is there and it’s possible. We have to just separate the pleasure and pain, that’s it. When something is really to be happy about we should enjoy it. Then only we will find that there are so many small things that can give us happiness. When we do this we are now really seeking for the happiness and we will attract it.