Be an individual if you want to be happy. If you want to be happy, then start choosing on your own. There are many times when you will have to be disobedient — be! There are many times when you will have to be rebellious — be! There is no disrespect implied in it. Be respectful to your parents. But remember that your deepest responsibility is towards your own being.
Everybody is dragged and manipulated, so nobody knows what his destiny is. What you really always wanted to do you have forgotten. And how can you be happy? Somebody who could have been a poet is just a moneylender.
Somebody who could have been a painter is a doctor. Somebody who could have been a doctor, a beautiful doctor, is a businessman. Everybody is displaced. Everybody is doing something that he never wanted to do — hence unhappiness.
Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Then suddenly you will come to know: meditation follows you.
If you love the work that you are doing, if you love the way you are living, then you are meditative. Then nothing distracts you. When things distract you, that simply shows that you are not really interested in those things.
The teacher goes on telling the small children: "Pay attention to me! Be attentive!" They are attentive, but they are attentive somewhere else. A cuckoo is crying with all its heart outside the school building, and the child is attentive — nobody can say he is not attentive, nobody can say he is not meditative, nobody can say he is not in deep concentration — he is.
In fact, he has completely forgotten the teacher and the arithmetic that he is doing on the board. He is completely oblivious. He is completely possessed by the cuckoo. And the teacher says: "Be attentive! What are you doing? Don't be distracted!" In fact, the teacher is distracting.
The child is attentive — it is happening naturally. Listening to the cuckoo, he is happy. The teacher is distracting and the teacher says: "You are not attentive." He is simply stating a lie. The child was attentive. The cuckoo was more attractive to him, so what can he do?
The teacher was not so attractive. The arithmetic has no appeal. But we are not born here to be mathematicians. There are a few children who will not be interested in the cuckoo. The cuckoo may go on getting madder and madder, and they will be attentive to the blackboard. Then arithmetic is for them. Then they have a meditation, a natural meditative state.
We have been distracted into unnatural motivations: money, prestige, power. Listening to the cuckoo is not going to give you money. Listening to the cuckoo is not going to give you power, prestige. Watching the butterfly is not going to help you economically, politically, socially. These things are not paying, but these things make you happy.
A real person takes the courage to move with things that make him happy. If he remains poor, he remains poor; he has no complaint about it, he has no grudge. He says: "I have chosen my way — I have chosen the cuckoos and the butterflies and the flowers. I cannot be rich, that's okay! But I am rich because I am happy."
OSHO