THE HAPPIEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE

A coupla days ago, I was filling out some form on a website. It had many not-so-to-the-point questions. But the one that really set me off, to thinking out of the box, was : "Whats the happiest moment of your life ?"

I was really disturbed because I couldnt remember any of it. Maybe because there are too many of them or maybe because there aient any. I chose to think on the former one. I pondered through the deep dungeons of my memory to short list one single happiest moment of my life. Well, I realised that I wasnt much of a searching kinda person when it came to search stuff without using Google. It was really hard to point out that single moment.

I went through most of my childhood memories, from which I could remember a very few. They say that a child's memory starts to develop after the age of 3, but it cant associate most of the things as they dont have total idea of their surroundings yet. Anyway, I went to the shelf where I keep my photo albums & dug out my childhood pictures. It was so much fun to see it all again, although I couldnt associate themwith many events, as they were taken when I was one or two years old. I took some help from mom & she told me what had happened during that picture was taken. Its so surprising that in every picture I was looking as if it were the happiesnt moment of my life. Then where did all these memories fade away!

But then I realised that its wise to think top down, so I went from my current state & started thinking backwards. I remembered the days when I met some really important people in my life, I recollected the memories of the first time I realised that I was in Love, I thought of how some people had said the right words at the right time & really made my day. Its amazing to think of all these things with a purpose or a sort of search condition just like we use on google, here the keyword was
" The happiest Moment of my Life ".

Nevertheless, I built up this humongous list thinking throughout that night. It had all the small things that had happened right since I started to remember things, through pre school, primary school, Teenage & till now. The little coincidences that happen everyday, the books I read, the day I realised that life is SHIT without Formula One , all those wacky movie watching sessions with my friends, my first booze ;) It was all so overwhelming to remember.

But there still wasnt a satisfactory answer. How does anyone know that some moment is the happiest moment of their lives ! Do people have to go through worst experiences to realise how their best days were ? Does this balance between good & bad things really matter to us ? I remember this amazing line from the movie Vanilla Sky, Cameron Diaz says this to Tom Cruise a few moments before she commits suicide by driving her car down a road & off a bridge with Tom still inside: " Whats happiness to you David (Tom's character's name) ?"

Thats exactly what I was thinking that night (obviously I was thinking about me & not David). Whats all this happiness after all? Is it just a hormonal surge which makes us feel happy, all those endorphins & adrenalin....? Seriously how do we scale memories as happy or sad moments ? These thoughts really made me sick that day. Its so weird to not get an answer to such a simple question when all the things that you want to know are available on the internet.

In the book 'The Seven Sins of Memory" the author Daniel Schacter says how the brain can play games & manipulate past memories according to your current state of mind & your mood. Was I a victim of one of these seven sins ? Was I thinking about the old things & purposely made them look like happy incidents ? I guess I would never know that. But I can definitely say that it feels so good to look back once in a while & to see the long trail of sweet & sour events that we have lived through, the people we have met & what roles they play in your life. Its almost orgasmic to realise that our brain retains almost all of it. I would like to quote it in the words of Ewan McGregor from the movie Trainspotting: "Take the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply by 1000, and you're still nowhere near it." Although Ewan was talking about heroine & I'm not :)

So it still remains a mystery about the happiest moment of my life, who knows, maybe I'm living in one....

Song for the moment: Filter - Take my picture