the secret of happiness
Recently a Brazilian in Orkut wrote a message to me saying that her friend had exactly the same kind of picture as me, with some text on it, and asked me what the text written above my picture was.
I answered “swatantra jeevi” in Kannada, which roughly translates to “free individual/spirit”.
Basically its a picture of a man in midair with outstretched limbs, with the Portugese words “O Pulo do Gatto”. To better appreciate the resemblance, if you have an orkut account, you could have a look at the profile of Alcides Gatto.
She wrote…
…
About Alcides’ inscription…. It´s a kind of joke, but I will try to explain it.
His last name is GATTO, which means the animal CAT in portuguese (but written with only one T, “gato”). The inscription on the picture says O PULO DO GATO, which can mean two things: PULO = leap, jump, so it should mean “the jump of the cat”, which also means a slang for “some secret that noone teaches to someone else” , like some secret formula to live. So, no one would teach it, because it´s so valuable (got it?). The dictionary says “a trick up one´s sleeve”, but I don´t think it is the equivalent in portuguese. So, what he said was exatly what YOU said, in other words. He said “my secret is that I live this way: freely” and you said “I am a free individual”.
…
Pretty cool, eh! 8)
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Anyway, nothing to do with Alcides but in general – I’ve come across this concept of “secret of happiness” in plenty of places. [of course apart from the claims in so many advertisements as well 😉 ] I’ve always wondered that if people have found some way of being happy, why don’t they just shout it out to everybody else? What’s the big deal about keeping something very valuable as a secret? I took quite a while to figure the answer to this one, and found a convincing answer in an incident in Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist. For those who haven’t yet read the book, I’ll keep this pretty sparse so that it won’t be a spoiler:
Two people – a boy and an older guy, are travelling in a desert. The older guy happens to be carrying a material that can transform any metal into gold. They’re confronted by some thugs, who ask them what they have. The boy is silent, because he knows that once the thugs discover their valuable posession, they’ll just kill them for sure. But the other traveller simply says “we’re carrying a material that can transform any metal into gold”. The boy is stunned and fearful. But the thugs laugh it off, dismiss them as idiots, and let them pass. And later the older traveller explains “if you have something so valuable, nobody will believe you even if you tell them”… so consequently, it ends up staying a secret…
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see also: a kid on a slide
Another thing that occured to me is that almost everybody believes that they have some kind of secret of happiness. 😉 Some theories I’ve come across, all said with a pretty strong conviction are…
\* dosen’t matter what anyone says, but being selfish and living for oneself is the only way
\* the secret is to keep your mouth shut
\* the secret is to accept Jesus Christ as your saviour and you’re safe on judgement day when the whole world of all non-believers will be sent to hell, and only the believers will be saved
\* just uttering the name of Krishna liberates you from a 1000 sins
Saudações Sanjay
Tudo bem contigo?
Desejo que sim, que esteja tudo numa boa, com você, sua famÃlia, trabalho e tudo mais…
Realmente, nossas fotos são semelhantes.
A minha representa, a liberdade. O desejo de ser e viver livre.
A inscrição na foto é “O Pulo do Gattoâ€, pelo fato do meu nome ser Alcides Gatto.
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Sanjay greetings.
All good with you?
Desire that yes, that it is everything in a good one, with you, its family, work and all more…
Really, our photos are similar.
Mine it represents, the freedom. The desire of being and living free.
The registration in the photo is “the Pull of the Gatto”, for the fact of my name to be Alcides Gatto.
I’m doing fine thank you very much for your kind words Alcides, nice to hear from you! Best wishes to your free being and living ! 🙂
Each of us create our own secret to live. Not always in a pleasant way, sometimes just using artificial tricks to keep going, we all need to find a comfortable way to live this life and take the best teachings from it, always learning how to improve ourselves. I sincerely believe that we are all connected and that there is a reason for things to occur. I happened to meet this young, nice and inttelligent guy from India called Sanjay, and I can´t believe our meeting was an accident. There must be a reason. We became friends and we found some commom interests, like the brazilian book writter Paulo Coelho and the Vipassana Meditation, which is a cool thing considering that we live in countries that have so different languages, religions and cultures. My friend Alcides’ picture in Orkut emphasises my beliefs that coincidences do not exist. I am quite impressed with this one, though.
Bernadete, thanks for your interesting comments. Though unfortunately I seem to have conned you into thinking I’m intelligent ;-). As for miracles and coincidences, there’s a nice quote by Albert Einstein “There are two ways to live, one is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.“