The Joy Of Life

In life, people often define the joy of life in luxurious pleasures and extravagant indulgences formed through abstractions. Like playing video games, shopping, watching a movie with friends or beloved, savoring a delicious dish. these activities and pastime become so common nowadays that we take them for granted, and without question, we take them as the joy of life.

To meet this definition of ideal lifestyle, Man relentlessly develops more extravagant cities which provide luxurious living, and the cost of living thus escalates ever on. With this idea hence, people crave over the thing called money. Only with money can we have access to these indulgences and pleasures. This is the joy of life as most people know it, the goal in life until the day they die.

But we have forgotten, or are ignorant to the fact that our hunger and thirst for pleasures is like a forest fire. The more wood it is fed, the stronger it burns. And when fed without discretion, it can spread and burn the whole forest down. In a person's case, his desires and inner dependance for sensual pleasures can become throw his mind and life into chaos and frustration.


Those who have experience this will agree. It is important to say here that I do not speak theoratically because I for one, has been there before. The feeling when the immense joy in life suddenly turns into unbearable sorrow and utter despair and hopelessness.

This is the crude truth, one that we shouldn't be ignore or be hoping that it will never happen to us. There are always two sides to a coin, one being joy, the other despair. But understand however, the two sides are of the same coin. It only becomes two sides when we perceive only a half of the coin, an incomplete perception.


In life, it is the same. We look to external means and possessions to shelter our needs but do not see the truth that we are the architects of our happiness, not the external means that we claim to give us happiness. Everything we encounter in every instance of everyday is all part of the reflections, the perception of our minds.

External things don't give out joy or sorrow, they exist under the encompassing law of nature, but it is the mind that joy and sorrow live and vanish. Not knowing this fact is like saying that a coin(life) only has 1 side(joy), or taking a flat drawing/image(pleasures) of a coin as the real coin(life).

In general, the joy of life, no matter how intense and fulfilling, cannot be reliable through fleeting external pleasures. It can only be found from understanding the true states of the things around you, by opening our mind to see the lives, feelings and needs of others. But doing this takes a lot of compassion and courage, as we learn to challenge our past habits and addictions in order to break free and see the whole picture, the whole coin.