Listening to life

Most of us would have stumbled over this familiar question “what is life?”, some of us would have given ourselves the familiar answers like “life is a journey”(maybe to heaven or hell, as if earth was a passing station!) or “life is a drama, we are all just actors”(who is the director and producer? Some might want to answer it is God (even for those who dint believe in one?)) And the rest of us would have just left the question as we always have more pressing things in life to attend to than getting philosophical. But it seems that few of us were adamant in finding the answer and it is such kind of people who went into deep meditations in dense forests or dangerous hilltops and finally felt that they discovered something or everything of importance. These people, at least some of them, became great spiritual masters in human civilisation. People who sought to find answers from these spiritualists rather became their worshippers than understanding what life is (as I see most of the spiritual texts are very complex and intrinsically complicated so the situation is understandable!)

Well, I too got interested in answering this question, especially because there were too many contradicting answers to another very popular question “how to lead one’s life?”. Most of us would have faced this situation so it is needless to explain further. I came to a conclusion that when the “what” part is clear the “how” part will automatically get clarified! Fortunately I was able to discover a valuable piece of wisdom in such pursuit.

Life manifests in many forms. Let us zero in on humans for now. Some are born healthy and some are wasted, some are born rich and some poor, many more variations can be observed by which we are affected either positively or negatively. Who is to be held responsible for these? But aren’t we supposed to ask a more basic question “is it necessary to hold somebody responsible?” I fully understand that we are bred in a society that glorifies the fact that to treat the effect one needs to study the cause very well, so it is clear that nothing should stop the hunt for reasons. Let’s apply the same to this problem. Many years of study of human history and civilizations have revealed that most of what humans believe and practice took form in a very natural way meaning there was no structured development and it was all so random. So obviously you can’t hold one person or one community or one event responsible for the differences and anything and everything it brings with it. This understanding gave me the following lesson, Getting obsessed with reasons is not a great idea. The COURSE is more important than the CAUSE.

So that decided we now have to understand how the course should be! Whenever this question surfaces on the horizons of mind I am reminded of one of the famous verses of the famous Longfellow from “the Psalm of life”, to be more specific let me quote the lines:

        “Lives of great men all remind us
         We can make our lives sublime,
         And, departing, leave behind us
         Footprints on the sands of time”

Today not many of us are concerned of what happens after death; in fact we are so much engrossed in squeezing countless activities into the twenty hours of the day. So our concentration is on the course which is good news! Now dealing the problem at hand of how the course should be handled. Is the course of life supposed to be a pursuit to greatness like Longfellow suggests(so that some shipwreck finds inspiration from it?)? And what does Greatness mean? Is it wealth and fame? Is that the recipe for unlimited joy in life? Simple observations are more than enough to understand that the wealthiest is not necessarily the happiest man! And fame, well the history is in itself the testimony that limelight-the instrument of fame is fickle(read carefully it is footprints on the sands not engravings on rocks!) and often not justified in the sense that the same public remembers both Abraham Lincoln who was instrumental in abolishing slavery and Adolf Hitler who spoke about (and implemented) ethnic cleansing!!! So what is the answer? Is our lives sublime only if it is comparable with that of personalities like Albert Einstein or Socrates? Well first of all we do not have first-hand evidence as to how these great people felt when they were alive. And even if it is for fun, let us assume that all of us did figure out the secret to greatness, o my god just imagine how many names to remember? It is nice to have one Albert Einstein, one Beethoven, but a million Einsteins- sounds crazy right? And our everyday life teaches us that people can touch our lives through simpler ways than complicated ones as in the technology of internal combustion engine! So it is clear the neither fame nor wealth is the criteria that suggest an ideal course of life!

Not just Albert Einstein or Beethoven had lived but so many other Toms’, Harrys’ and Dicks’ had also had lives and they were not worthless just because it was not recorded. Maybe there is no ideal way to living life. All lives are justified as they are. And the baseline to be remembered is that we are a part of a very complicated organisation/civilisation how we affect or not affect the world is out of our reach and control.

With all these analysis intact, the final conclusion that I arrived upon was that life is a set of events that occur with no particular reason, through which we navigate based on our individualistic perception (courtesy: the society we are born into), look around and you will understand any reason is born only after the event has occurred, Reasons don’t lead to events, it is events that lead to reasons. And the activities we do, may it be anything from simple ones like reading a book to composing literature or launching a satellite, they are all just expenditures of the energy we are invested with. This simplifies everything so much that, whether you were instrumental in the development of cutting edge technology or you spent all your time chatting with your girlfriend/boyfriend, both bear not much of a difference from the cosmic standpoint. There is no hierarchy of lifestyles or living!

my life my very own way

However we are bound to expend the energy we consume and that is the cosmic law, and it is blessed that we have the advantage of choice to select in what ways we are to do the same. It would be just great to celebrate the randomness of life and living.

CHEERS TO LIFE AND Living!!!

LoVe it LiVe It!!!