Cloud Busting : Feeling Of Dominance And Happiness

                                    Cloud Busting by Kate Bush

Yesterday it was a beautiful sunny day. The garden was looking nice with green lawn and vibrant colours in the boarder. I put the lounger under the apple tree and settled there with a book. In Manchester, it is not often that you get a clear blue sky. I put the book down and just looked up at this vast blue canopy. A few small white clouds were wandering around. 

I was suddenly transported back in time. I remembered lying on the roof of our house in Bachari, a small village in India with my cousin brother who was about the same age as me. We selected a small white cloud in the sky and stared at it with all the concentration we could muster at that age. Hey presto! The cloud started to disintegrate and completely disappeared. We felt very powerful and very happy. After we discovered this, anytime we saw a cloud in the sky we would try to banish it. It only worked on the smaller ones but still we felt like superman.

I tried it again on this Manchester cloud. It still worked. I know the clouds form and disappear on their own accord, without any help or hindrance from me but still it made me smile. 

Human desire to dominate and feel powerful is very strong. When it is fulfilled, one feels happy.  Desire to dominate is reminiscent of the greatest evolutionary process of dominance of one species over another. Triggering of happiness switch in the brain when one feels powerful is probably a necessary evolutionary tool.

This on occasions where desire to dominate is too strong and the resultant feeling of happiness is too great, can become a vicious circle.  This is what produces bullies, tyrants and despots.

On the other hand it can be a virtuous circle when feeling of happiness comes from dominating by legitimate means in one’s chosen field of science, arts or sports. This is what makes the Nobel laureate, great artists and sporting legends.

In majority of people including me, it just produces a circle, neither vicious nor virtuous. That explains why I am not a warlord or a Nobel laureate. 

The power to vanish the cloud made me just happy enough to try staring on the next piece of cloud rather than try my power on my better half who was calling me from the kitchen.