The beauty of “Now”

During those weekends when you feel there is nothing to do when actually you have much on your platter. However slow you want the weekends to be, how so ever early you rise or how much longer you run from your routine extra, you find that at the end of the day the
time flies past. It is like those rows of trees, those small brick houses outside the window of a train that seem to run behind at a constant pace, no matter how you crane you neck out they just go behind you and dissolve into an infinite oblivion. To do away with this feeling of running ahead of my weekends I try to slow down but in vain.

While taking a bus journey, I looked around and found an old man sitting at the front seat ahead of me. He had a mobile phone in his hand that was as old as he probably. The man was in his white shirt and black pant looked about 55-60 years of age. He had a tuft of white hair on his head with a few of them protruding out of his ear.  After fidgeting with his phone for a few minutes he opened his messages and began reading them one by one. After reading each message he deleted it. This went on for quite a few messages. So out of curiosity I craned my neck to read what the messages were. The first one read “Happy retired life sir”, the second one said “We will miss you sir” and so on.

The old man had retired after 30-35 years at service. By deleting the messages he was trying to cut the chords that tied him to his past, to those years of service. We feel not looking back or doing away the memories will make us forget the past. We search for all the memories and try to weed them out one by one in a hope that this would save us from the nostalgia. But why do we want to break away or forget the past which was so good. Do we not like to remember good stuff, do we not want to be surrounded by the happy feeling of good times that make us look at the future in a hope of reliving the past. Then why was he deleting the memories.

We humans are the most dissatisfied out of all the creations of God. In childhood, we crave for good marks. Once we have marks we crave for the top position in class, once teens, we crave for a good college and then a good job. And then after all those years at service, in the twilight of our lives we crave for reliving the past. This is why the man was cutting all the chords from the past. He wanted to forget about something that he will no longer have “the daily 9-5 job.” Getting up in the morning and leaving for the job in a haste only to return late in the evening. Cursing the Mondays and looking forward to the weekends. Cursing our daily routine and waiting for the end of each month for our salary. No matter how sad or depressing this predictable life looks on paper all of us live it and most of us crave for it at the end of our careers.

Those 25 years at the job we are all runners who are running at a great speed. We run to see what is at the end of the race and once we reach the final post we long for the race. We long for someone that boss to manage us. We long for the feeling of completing our monthly targets or for that yearly bonus that gives us a free pass to “dine out”. Suddenly we find ourselves so heavily addicted to our daily routine that even the thought of slowing down fills us with gloom. We forget that this emptiness is not a curse it’s what that has been bestowed on us as a reward of all those years at work. Why do we not see it?

Are we so lost that we don’t see the light the end of the tunnel. Do we love the darkness so
much that even the thought of light scares us. Out of all the living beings, only humans walk on two legs and have the ability to choose. Then why do we choose to ignore the voice within is. Why do we fail to see the beauty of “now”?

Know your options in life

 

 

“ I am done with this large equations and complex formulas” said Sameer using both his hands to shut his arithmetic book.

The loud thud startled his mother who was preparing the afternoon meal in the kitchen. She came out and looked at his father who was by now looking towards Sameer. He shot a glance towards the mother as if trying to decode what the future has in store for their son, because if not studies then how would Sameer fend for himself in this breathtakingly fast and ultra-competitive world. The same age old roti kapda makaan and yes car too, after all a car is a must have “zarurat” these days, question haunted them. Sam’s detest towards arithmetic was not something new, it was a topic as hot as a furnace and as steamy as the yummy chennai idli sans the yum part of course, in their 3 bedroom house. It all had been perfectly fine till Sameer’s choices and decisions were taken by them but as he grew bigger in body, God forbid his mind also somehow gained a few kilos thus prompting him to do what any Indian parents would never want their children to do themselves, yes folks sameer started thinking and making his own decisions when i say making it is no way similar to taking because that luxury is entirely his parents prerogative. Sam walked away from the dining area and stood at the window in his room overlooking the main road crisscrossing through the city not knowing where it will end or stop. After a few miles turning into a black line disappearing among a herd of cars and a fleet of people. He was over his bad mood by now and started to contemplate, which was what he enjoyed doing, he liked to reflect on things  be it the rising sun, the blooming flower or a sparrow feeding it’s children on his window sill everyday. He laughed at mankind and always thought ” what if we have reached the moon, conquered the skies but ultimately technology the subject that his father wants him to pursue has  taken away childhood away from a child who is bespectacled and hooked on to a tab the whole day. It has replaced mother’s lullaby with dick sized thing blurting shitty songs that make small children’s sleep, it makes parenting so very easy.” Man made cars to shorten the distances between places, unsatisfied he made aeroplanes only to further shorten the distance all this while polluting the environment. So the new past-time is controlling pollution and so summits, reports, protocols and what not to reduce the pollution entered into the scene. Maybe technology has a solution for this too, but how far are we ready to go in order to satisfy our ulterior motives and make life easier. We create problems and then find their solutions which only give rise to more problems and many more solutions.  A person is intertwined in so many things that ultimately running behind pleasures becomes his sole motive. Although Sam did not know what he wanted to do in life, but he surely knows that he would not be a part of this “pleasure seeking, self-destroying” herd. He looked once more at the road and now the black line was a bit clearer or at least he could look farther anyway.

 

So the bottomline is don’t be plagued by the question of what you want to do, because that question seldom has one concrete answer, try picking out things that you will surely not do in your life. At the dusk of life when the stars are twinkling and the moon is shining you will know that all this while everything that you did was all that you could have ever loved and enjoyed. That will make the night less dreary and more starry.

It is all a game of “perception”

Perception is the biggest power endowed to us the living beings, this is the power that makes trees a lot greener and the sky a lot distant then these truly are. Everything from as small as a daily wake cup coffee to a big assignment at office, the sheer intensity of the moment is the direct result of how we perceive the situation at hand. Einstein’s “theory of relativity” defines everything from a plane of reference; according to his theory every situation in the world is the result of this observer and object concept. Take for instance the rising sun in the morning, for us the sun is rising but for some people across the same globe the same sun appears to be setting at the same point of time. Thus we believe the sun rising because that is what is we perceive, that is the power of perception. This power is in direct sync with “seeing and believing”.

This subtlety can be applied to trivial encounters of daily life as well. In my view all the materialistic things are a result of of perception, our thoughts. The color of my laptop is black, but is it truly black who is to confirm this assumption. We all are human beings and hence we all are at the same plane of reference thus for all of us the materialistic things are of the same nature, hence the laptop is colored black indeed but who vetoes this, a friend isn’t it.

This brings us to the question of diversity between individuals, if we all have a same plane of reference then what is the difference between all of us. Surely we are not different; God has kept each of us at the same plane, so the outer world for each of us is definitely same in the color, texture and view. Then what do our spiritual gurus foresee and when they say “everyone is unique and is for a purpose, remember that there was never a “you” in the past nor there will be any in the future”. I took some time out and thought about this statement and realized that we are missing the bigger picture here. The difference is the thought process that we have; our perception of the external things drives creation of thoughts in our mind, which is where everyone is unique. Take for instance a “a river”, for a small child the sound of water gushing will be a source of pleasure but for a grown up individual it will be a river on its journey to meet the sea, or for an environmentalist it would be the polluted river water that takes the front row. Thus all take the input as water but it is their thought process that differs. The next question is what drives us to perceive something in some way and no other, surely never was anyone born with a perception. Our perception is a result of a long and steady process which starts the moment we are born and ends with our death. In between we are molded to view sky as something that “does not exist and is explored by the scientists”. Our thoughts are a result of this molding process called “education”. School education is just 10 percent of this process the rest are life experiences that shape and define us.

Not all the experiences are forgotten, they are stored in our subconscious. That is why the sight of a “rose flower” will never be of just a flower for a “heartbroken lover”. All this was therorisized by Einstein in the form of “theory of relativity” gave physics an eternal concept. But he only put down in words what human beings were experiencing since ages; the only difference is that he realized it and we do not. If you want to be happy and experience the eternal bliss, try changing your perception of things and you will never fall short of reasons smile that is the most sought after entity today.