Anxious times ahead...but perhaps with a chance of happiness?

Daniel Gilbert says in his book, 'Stumbling Upon Happiness,' about how we tend to categorize an entire event as a happy/good one or a sad/bad one based on how it ended. A bad vacation that ends with a fantastic sunset classifies as a happy event in our minds, while a lovely movie that ends badly classifies in our mind as a bad movie.

I thought about this as I continued fretting about India. And I tried to analyze truthfully why I felt India was so filled with unhappiness for me. I remembered then how I left India at the age of 24, at a time when I had started arguing incessantly with my parents, was tired of missing my sweetheart, aching to find my own way in life. Granted I detested being mauled on the streets by strange, dirty men, hated the filthy local trains, and absolutely loathed the place we lived in surrounded by the worst people imaginable (to me anyway). All of this would as per Gilbert's theory make my overall impression of life in India miserable. Why would I ever want to go back to that?

As far as leaving my current garden of eden, I conveniently forgot to recall how horribly homesick I was when I first arrived in Ohio for my MBA. How much I missed my parents' warmth, my brother's camaraderie. How watching the back of my husband's car leaving me in my rented digs to return to Chicago cleaved through me every other weekend like daggers. I was miserable then too. It took me two years to get used to being in a foreign land. Bad start to say the least. There were good times but there also have been some very bad ones--money troubles, work troubles, everything ordinary people might go through in the span of a decade and a half.

But now following all of that, life here is wonderful. Friends, home, family. Everything is right. The end of this experience is a stellar one. And so leaving this to go back to that Indian misery seems a jump in the wrong direction.

I have forgotten the good times in India, my walks and scooter rides with my darling husband, the unforgettable times with my music, my family, extended family. Good food, good people I've known and been cherished by over the years of my very privileged childhood.

Maybe there is something to what Gilbert says, I'm glad to say. I'm being unreasonable. Thinking with horse blinds on. Being horribly short-sighted.

Yes anxious times loom ahead by virtue of their uncertainty. But surely, happy times lurk somewhere in the corners too.