To ‘Recover the Lost Habit of Happiness’…

My friends on Facebook know it already, although you don’t know about it yet here, because of my technical incapacity to bring such links here too, and not just on my Facebook space: a few days ago a momentous minuscule event happened in my life, which I was waiting for since about thirty years.
Here goes:
A short piece of music by Vangelis that I had heard long ago at a friend’s place in another part of Auroville, and which had had a most wonderful effect on me, had remained since then a mystery and a loss, as I didn’t know the title of that song – it was a song -, nor even the title of the album it was from, and my friend, with all the many CDs of Vangelis music he possessed, had never been able to guess what that specific piece was, from the little I remembered of it later: the melody, and the words on which every verse ended, very striking to me, as they were ‘I’m happy, that is all I know…’ 
A few days ago while searching Vangelis on Google because of his Oscar-winning opening score for ‘Chariots of Fire’ (see my posts about that great film), celebrated again right now and played many times during these present Olympic Games happening in UK itself, it suddenly occurred to me to google precisely those words I remembered from that mysterious other piece, together with the name of Vangelis.
And the miracle happened. There it was on the screen, the title of my beloved song I had been looking for since so long: ‘My Face in the Rain‘, from the album called ‘Earth’, 1973.
My heart full of an almost sacred expectation, I listened to it again after all those years, and again it had on me the same so wonderful effect: the simple, true happiness it sang of flowed into my being again, calmly but irresistibly, from within.

Vangelis – My face in the rain lyrics</a>
If by the time I post this there is still no link in it allowing you to listen to that song directly yourself, please do find your own way to it, so that the rest of this post brings its intended benefits to you too, with my comments on it down below:
Being a researcher, in the intervening years I have learnt to observe exactly the whys and the hows of what is happening within me, so this time around I almost immediately noticed what was producing that effect on me; it was two fold:

1/ the lyrics and their very meaning:

    My face in the rain
I walk all alone
It’s Sunday, time is slow
I’m happy, that is all I know

2/ the rhythm of the melody, the way the song is sung, literally breathing these words out, actually as if they were written like this:

    My face…
In the rain…
I walk…
All alone…
It’s Sunday…
Time is slow…
I’m happy…
That is all I know…

Just try it yourself, simply breathing in, before breathing out each little line and letting it fade away into silence; then again breathing in, and breathing out the next little line…
What’s really happening is that you are slowing down your breath ever so naturally, and focusing in that way on your physical being, ever so naturally again, totally effortlessly. Automatically, you are relaxing, and your consciousness is settling back from your head and hectic mind to your body and its soon quieting physicality.

Now back to the words:
You will notice that what the words say describe precisely this very inner state when we go away from mental activity and somehow reconnect with our physicalness, generally by a renewed contact with our physical environment:
‘My face in the rain (or ‘to the sun’, as in the next verse, otherwise identical)… describes that contact deliberately looked for;
‘I walk…’, which is not ‘I run’ with its eagerness and excitement;
‘All alone’ doesn’t mean loneliness but the opportunity to turn inward and be more deeply oneself, in silence instead of the constant chatter and superficiality that company usually makes inevitable.
‘It’s Sunday’ brings in the ‘vacation’ feeling of having no duty, no work to do, and so, of having all the time you want… expressed next, so utterly well, by ‘Time is slow…’
… And the perfect result of that blissful absent-mindedness but full presence to the moment, that needs no justification, no reason for just being:
Happiness, all round and peaceful, both self-contained and feeling at one with everything else in the universe…
‘I’m happy, that is all I know…’

There you have it all, the inner contents, so to say, of simple happiness, and of the magic it works on our being.

I have tried above to bring your attention to the few necessary ‘ingredients’ that make the ‘recipe’ for what could be called, yes, daringly, ‘Instant Happiness’, for indeed such a recipe is there, only we don’t know it.
That simple song is providing it all to us.

Now why am I giving so much importance to happiness?…
Because it is our natural, divine way of being.
So much so, that it is what keeps our body in a state of health as well (see my post ‘Gesundheit’).
This is why Sri Aurobindo had that lovely line about happiness, as the ‘lost habit’ that we must ‘recover’, for happiness must become again our natural, spontaneous, constant state of being .
Remember ‘Mother’s Five Points Program’ (see my post), this short message by Mother indicating the five inner states that constitute the ideal inner attitude for doing this  ‘Integral Yoga’, this process of all rounded Conscious Evolution of all the parts of our being? Happiness is part of it of course. And how to be happy in the present condition of the world and of humanity, one might ask: by remembering always that it’s going to change, and better yet, it IS changing! Our personal, individual happiness is actually one of the things that help everything else to change faster, so let’s get on with it!!!
My own way of training myself to ‘recover the lost habit of happiness’, is to use songs such as the lovely one from Vangelis, and other similarly helpful songs, in whatever language happens to touch and move me, but with that particular rhythm that fits with one’s breathing and brings our whole being to this wonderful feeling that

‘It’s Sunday, Time is slow, I’m happy, that is all I know…’