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Indarjit Singh |
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In the current economic gloom and the risk of one country's woes affecting others, a little bit of good news, like the announcement of the royal engagement, is doubly cheering. As a Sikh, I also welcome the government's initiative to help us see our economic concerns in a fuller perspective of individual and national wellbeing. The founders of our different religions have long reminded us that there is much more to life than the pursuit of material prosperity. I'm less sure however, that the Office for National Statistics will ever be able to come up with a meaningful measure of individual and national wellbeing.
In this search for happiness and wellbeing, I'm reminded about a poem that I used to read our children, called 'The Shirt of a Happy Man'. It tells the story of a king obsessed with his health, who'd fly into a rage when doctors told him there was nothing wrong with him. Eventually, a wise and perceptive doctor told him that he would be restored to full health if he slept one night in the shirt of a happy man. The king sent messengers throughout the land to find such a man, but all they found were people with real concerns. The reports of the suffering of his subjects made the king ashamed of his imagined woes, and as he began to look to the needs and concerns of his subjects, he experienced true contentment for the first time in his life.
In many ways we've become a bit like the king, a little over-obsessed with our own wellbeing. We are not helped by the media and adverts that constantly pander to our greed and vanity. Guru Nanak urged us to look beyond ourselves when he taught: "Where God exists there is no self, where self exists there is no God". And a Christian theologian put it in even blunter terms when he said "it's the I in the middle of sin, that makes it sin".
Sikh teachings remind us that there is nothing wrong with material comfort, but for a true sense of wellbeing we need to look beyond ourselves to the needs others, as we will be reminded in this week's Children in Need Appeal. Contentment may be difficult to quantify in an index, but as a Sikh I believe our own sense of wellbeing is directly proportional to the amount of our life we devote to helping those around us.