The Sack

by Sadia Raval

Mula came upon a frowning man walking along the road to town.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

The man held up a tattered bag and moaned, “All that I own in this wide world barely fills this miserable, wretched sack.”

“Too bad,” said Mula, and with that, he snatched the bag from the man’s hands and ran down the road with it.

Having lost everything, the man burst into tears and, more miserable than before, continued walking.

Meanwhile, Mula quickly ran around the bend and placed the man’s sack in the middle of the road where he would have to come upon it.

When the man saw his bag sitting in the road before him, he laughed with joy, and shouted, “My sack! I thought I’d lost you!”

Watching through the bushes, Mula chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to make someone happy!”

How to be Happy

Most people coming to me for therapy obviously come with some immediate concern at hand. However innately they appear to be holding the same question in their hearts  as all of you who read this perhaps also do. ” How to be Happy?”.   Some part of any counselling process often gets dedicated to helping people identify the happiness that is already there in their lives, in the present, and to experience it for what it is worth.

As the story shows, Happiness is not a distant bird somewhere in some bush. It is often perching right upon our own shoulder. Often we fail to recognize it unless it flies away or as in the above case, gets taken away.

I wish all of you who read this a pleasant discovery of this already existing happiness, at least for today…

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A king received two small falcons as a gift and gave them to the master of falconry to train them.  After some months, the master informed the king that one of the falcons was perfectly, but he did not know what happened the other one since had not moved from the branch where he left him since the day he arrived.

The king sent out to call for healers to see the falcon, but nobody could make it fly.
 
The following day the monarch decided to communicate to his people he would offer a reward to the person that would make the hawk fly.  The following morning he saw the hawk flying agilely by the gardens.  The king told his court:
—Bring me the author of that miracle.
 
His court brought him a humble peasant.  The king asked him:
—Did you make the falcon fly? How did you do it? Are you perhaps a magician?
 
Intimidated the peasant told the king:
 —It was easy, my Lord, I only cut the branch and the hawk flew, he realized he had wings and began to fly.

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don’t worry… be happy

(~_~)