Thunderbolt of Happiness ..
Happiness is a subjective affair and comes to us wrapped in different events and activities. It is often neglected due to sheer repetition and state of our surrounding. While happiness is in the air; in this modern era, we are constantly searching for reasons to refrain from embracing it. The fact that my best friend has the best car, undermines my joy of getting my first car. This post is about my recent encounter with happiness that opened my eyes to some common topics surrounding happiness. This story is about a gigabit ethernet adapter that gave us one of the finest moment of our life.
I am a Software Engineer by profession — well, that sums it all, doesn’t it? By now you might have guessed the reason why am I writing or carving for happiness. Yeah! being a software developer sucks but the amount that lands in our bank account sort of makes up for it. There are enough posts out there criticizing software roles, fortunately, or unfortunately, this post is not one of those. I have recently started with my job so everything is nothing less than glittery.
It was Friday evening, 7 on the clock; we are ready to run out of the office. As usual, I started it on the group chat “Chalooo” (meaning let’s leave). The group had four people out of which one had already left. Aurabh and Nirav were in the office ready to leave(names softly mangled to preserve privacy). Aurabh came to my desk to pick me up. This was indeed a rare view as he would not get out of his chair until everyone lines up at his desk. He strongly believes in the fact that there is n number of fucks and we should use them carefully. I had some last minute code check-in pending so Aurabh was looking around and waiting for me to finish.
He spotted something he had been, sorry we had been desperately looking for- a thunderbolt to ethernet adapter. Colleagues sitting next to me were having those. As he enquired, he realized that there’s a bunch of new adapters at the reception and he had to hurry before it was gulped by others. Without telling me anything he rushed to the reception and got the device. He came back running happily to tell the whole story. By the time he showed up, Nirav was already at my desk, both of us waiting for Aurabh.
He came back to see us waiting, we knew he had some hell of good news. He was so happy that his smile was surely no less than a marathon winner. Not kidding but the cheerfulness would have even got him into a happy dent advertisement — “issmile please”. He had his trophy and controlling his breath to vomit the story. We were both happy and angry. Happy because we could get something we had been looking for; angry because he went alone and now we stand the risk of losing it. We know the importance of timing in such situations and I had first-hand experience of hearing to “sorry this was the last piece” at several occasions.
All of us ran in unison towards the reception. Fortunately, they had enough units to cater to our needs. Somehow, I don’t know why but we were screaming of joy as if our life depended on it. And the truth is we were smoothly working even without it. Three happy faces — rolling, giggling, running out of the office.
A month back we got our MacBooks worth 2L and I don’t remember if there was slightest of happiness on our face. Maybe because the entire room filled with 50 odd people had the same laptop in their hand. This 1.5k ethernet adapter had done to us something that even our big fat salary couldn’t do to us. The joy was inevitable and I am not at all exaggerating. In fact, I doubt if my words could ever do justice to that feeling. And when we realized our laughter had no bounds. We realized that we were happy about something we will never use. We realized that even without this adapter we were just living fine. So, why are we so happy?
Because we did not see it coming; because there were many waiting for the adapter. Because we had earned it by running our way to reception just on time. Let us find happiness in small things is what they say and it is indeed true. We often tend to ignore our achievements if we see it coming; if it gets repetitive. In the quest to improve every day we forget to stop and enjoy whatever we have at hand; our hard-earned happiness. One thing after the another we always try to match our living idols and these idols keep on changing once we have surpassed one. There is no stopping to this personal stigma. “.. So when the day begins you better be running” — Quotes are beautiful and inspiring. They help us come out of adversity but blindly following them throughout our life will not let us enjoy the fruits.
Unknowingly, we keep on raising the bar for being happy each day. An event like this tells us that we do find happiness in such small things but neglect it otherwise. Activities like stopping the lift in middle(although risky), helping a blind man crossing the road or having ginger tea at midnight make us happier than our high paying jobs, our position or exceptional work. Maybe because it’s simply a routine and as humans, we get bored with the routine. So let’s stop for a while and embrace what we have rather than looping out for more!
📝 Read this story later in Journal.
🗞 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy Tech stories, opinions, and news waiting in your inbox: Get the noteworthy newsletter >
