An Attitude of Gratitude : Wishing you a Happy and Prosperous Chinese New Year!
Last night my wife and I drove through Eu Tong Sen Street to take in the Chinese New Year decorations. Chinatown was literally painted red. During this celebrative season, red is not the colour of desire. It is the colour of prosperity and happiness. Photo from TheStar Prosperity is a successful, flourishing, or thriving condition, especially in financial respects; prosperity is about good fortune. Happiness is a subjective state of well-being related to good fortune, pleasure, contentment and joy. Reflecting on prosperity and happiness, I am struck by the idea that it is possible to be unhappy not because we are not prosperous (relatively speaking even as prosperity is always a relative thing), but because we are not aware of our own prosperity and therefore not content with what we have. It occurs to me that happiness does have a lot to do with contentment, which is essentially a state of satisfaction. It also occurs to me that the key to contentment is gratitude. It...