Whatever it takes to be happy

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“How To Be Happy In 101 Days”

The title is the most interesting part with the promise of an end goal–happiness. The poem breaks out into a very poetic list of things that you are advised to do. I wonder if each of these things in the list carry an individual power to make you happy or whether only upon the completion of all the tasks in the list, could you achieve happiness. Read poem.

The list starts by demanding something that feels very simple on the face of it; adore stone as if asking you to love someone immobile, someone very wooden and boring and incompatible with yourself. Throughout this first stanza, Doshi is advising us to give time to something or someone that you generally find less entertaining.

She pulls sarcasm when she puts look for utilitarian values in violence in the list. Surely a very dark way of saying “waste your time finding something that isn’t even there.” As I kept advancing through the list, I realised that I’ve got the answer to the very first question I had asked; These tasks can not individually make one happy because as humans we have a tendency to rely on instant gratification and none of the things in the list so far, has given me a quick dose of delight.

to use the knife lustily is such an intimate activity. This reminds me of the times when I sit outside in the balcony, alone, and slowly peel back the skins of oranges, devouring them seductively. Cutting bread for the undending hunger of dogs feels honest to me. It’s an act that must be done over and over again because once is not enough even if it instantly delights the human heart. You can not wash hands with suffering by one good act of kindness.

Renounce your house. Take just one  
object with you. Slip it in your pocket.  
Marvel at how a simple thing can  
connect the variegated skeins of time.

She’s asking us to do something so heart-breaking–to renounce the house. Not renounce it like “oh, I’m gonna go out for a walk” or like “I’m going on a vaction so the house will be empty.” The very house that took years to essemble with its objects and people and memories must be forsaken but she allows one object. That object will become our house for the rest of 101 days.

On the 99th  day, you must surrender  
this object, but until then feel free  
to attach sentiment to it.

So much about letting go. Does happiness come through learning to let go? because Doshi later in the poem asks us to find a tree to hang your dead and their belongings. Now, letting go is not the same as forgetting, but rather it’s a means to unburdening. This is a recurring theme throughout the poem. Doshi continuously demands for poessesions (both the tangible and intangible) to be let go of.

She’s asking to reconnect with the nature to feel how much larger this world really is than the self (I think its a satire on internet and the people of the internet). Like really really reconnect with the nature which is evident in the lines:-

Rub the smooth globes of their roots  
in our palms before biting in to their hearts.  
Lean backwards and listen to the slippery  
bastard of your own arrhythmic heart.

I like how she says remind yourself that you feel pain because that’s how you know that you must be alive. Pain is the thread that connects us to reality. It is the scream that keeps us awake. One of my favourite lines is stain your fingers in ink. Ink is something that is very close to my heart. When I doodle or write poems on my notebooks in ink, I feel the world around me crumble to nothing. Ink for me is the highest vessel of intimacy and peacefulness.

You’d think that killing must be truly horrific. Many summers ago, as I sat fishing at the brink of a wild pond and threw the bait in, I caught my first Telapia. I beat its head hard on the ground and watched life slowly leave its eyes and it didn’t feel horrible. I felt like an observer. I watched the feeble grip of life weakening with a strange interest. Doshi advises Do not close your eyes.

I didn’t know clavicles meant collar bones in plurality. I agree with her. Offer them to someone. In fact, keep on offering them, its a pleasure that one should be aware of.

When she asks to offer your children to a stranger or if you’re childless, offer the person you love best, I felt a pang of sadness. It felt like betrayal on Doshi’s part. Why would you ask of something so cruel? Is this what will secure happiness in 101 days? Later, when I read these lines over and over again, I realised something. I think she’s asking us to give our loves some room to breathe. This reminded me of the song Let Her Go by Passenger.

Spend the night in the cemetary and allow yourself the fear of the deads by hearing their laughs. I think she honestly means it. No metaphor there. However, this is something that I will never be able to do. I watched a horror movie last summer and the images still haunt me.

Doshi asks to not bother with the stars because they are for the romantics who apparently aren’t happy people. What a call out. Skip this step if you’re a poet. These tasks that she enlists are each so difficult to perform and somehow happiness feels like a lot of work.

How little you know yourself, a challenge against instincts to know how much we know ourselves. I’ve always been very jealous of people who know themselves. Something about the quality of being decisive and instinctive feels arousing to me. Reminds me of how Elio envies Oliver for saying “I know myself too well” in CMBYN and I feel that. Doshi however, understands that its uncommon to be naturally instinctive thus she asks us to allow mistakes : try the other path in order to understand. She wants us to know that instincts are built, not naturally inherited.

After going through so many arduous tasks, our sublimation is afoot but first we must meditate. I guess meditating is meant to balm all the hurt that the previous tasks have afflicted on our minds. She’s asking us to stabilize ourselves before we graduate this course of happiness. Surprisingly, the quest of giving up hasn’t ended yet. She wants us to give up our bodies to tigers (here tigers must mean someone familiar) and if not tigers then some other hungry creature. She draws focus on the importance of losing our bodies and minds.

The time has come to bury that one treasured thing we had acquired before renouncing our houses. It is the 99th day. The journey has been far too difficult than what I had imagined. Her last piece of advice is the most important one throughout the list. She wants us to search for a mirror (a very ordinary plane mirror), strip in front of it and relflect. It’s funny how, after going through so much, it is I who can only tell whether I’m happy. There’s no score card, no evalutation report, there’s nothing that could ever tell whether you were successful in attaining happiness. And this is what scares me. This subjectivity with which life must be lived.

Sigh Sigh Sigh Sigh

Tishani Doshi’s poems are pensive. I love how guideful this poem is. What’s more fascinating is when I approached the end of the poem, I realised that this poem is a mere scaffolding. We each, must find our own list of things to do to attain happiness in 101 days. I hope this poem encourages you to read more poems by Doshi.