Happiness Is An Orange Dot..

 Pic By the author

Our lives are not in a constant even flow. There are troughs and crests interspersed with the routine business of living. While the crests are easy to ride- being as they are about intense happiness, success, joy et all, it’s the troughs which get us down and out. Unhappiness, grief, or just plain boredom.

I am VERY susceptible to these troughs…. they get to me -marginally sometimes and SPECTACULARLY once in a way. Much overdosing on chocolate and indulging in bouts of self-pity usually start. Just as martyrdom is closing in, however, I get rescued. By the little orange dots in my life.

Sounding daft am I?  Well as a great believer in signs. Little orange dots is my phrase for small seemingly insignificant occurrences  which happen to us out of the blue and make us smile despite the negative state of mind. And I just don’t mean smile. I mean a smile which starts at the heart, warms it up, gives it a hug, and then graduates to the lips which curve involuntarily upwards while the eyes light up, crinkle at the sides and one smiles with one’s entire being. And once you smile, it gets kind of difficult to stay unhappy or bored. One starts seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, the sun shining. One says there is hope….that this too shall pass. That if God has brought you to it, he will take you through it.

It could be a song on the radio, a sentence in the book we are reading, the horoscope in the newspaper, just a name across a rear windshield of a car. It could be a little blooming flower, a smile from a passerby, a bar of Snickers on my table, a call from a friend. But the moment we see it, experience it,we feel better. Invariably, it explains what’s bothering us and acceptance settles in.

Why little orange dots? Well, these days, I spend a lot of time on Facebook- including accessing it from my phone. And every time I get a message, a little orange dot hovers over the Message icon on my phone. I kid you not, my heart leaps! A message for me! Someone has remembered me. A friend has reverted to me. A friend has written to me! And I am eager to retrieve that message in a hurry. I think it also because personal messages are rare and a message in the inbox is meant ONLY for me and not a general update. Thus to me all these signs have become my little orange dots…of hope and smiles. Harbingers of better things..

 In any   case-doesn’t having a Little Orange Dot moment sound better than experiencing a “Random Occurrence Which Made Me Happy, and Stopped Me From Running Over/Running Into/Running Away From People?”

So all these unexpected moments in my life are my little orange dots…keeping me going, keeping me doing. No self-pity, no pulling myself down. Living life, accepting it and moving on….one step at a time. Did I say I was smiling while at it?

Some memorable dots have stayed clearly etched clearly in memory for they possibly may have occurred when the number of lemons life had handed was in unwieldy quantities and I had lost my recipe for lemonade.

The Flowers-I had discarded a dozen flowerpots on the terrace of the flat I resided in. It was a lemony period and horticulture was far from my mind. Indeed, these pots were dry and had no seeds or plants in them….just a lot of earth. On a particularly sour day, I happened to go up for a look and beheld a sight to gladden most hearts. It had rained and there was in that corner a PROFUSION of flowers….pink yellow orange. They had seeded themselves and were blooming away happily. And I was smiling away happily, as a fog seemed to lift from my mind and the beauty of those flowers; the colours and the sunshine from that day have remained clearly defined in my mind as of new life and new hopes.

 The Song– Recently, after a long, tiring, very argumentative day, I had collapsed with my laptop and a movie and decided on some drastic measures to change life. This included severing ties with family, becoming a recluse, and possibly acquiring a bad habit. And then came the song-Ek rasta hai zindagi, jo tham gaye to kuch nahin” and I had a little orange dot moment.  I knew I had to go on…

Don’t get me wrong. Not for a minute am I expecting life to be a bed of roses or only about smiling and being happy always. Or only about being unhappy either. It’s about the circle of life going on, and a little orange dot making some moments special for us. And who knows…maybe we join the dots and find our answers in the emerging picture?

Rachna Tiwari is a hospitality professional, residing in Gurgaon and working in New Delhi. She hails from a services background and has lead a nomadic life in her formative years. Her interests include reading, movies and writing a blog about pretty much anything which catches her fancy!