Life
can be seen in many ways. We can make different inferences about life depending
on the angle from which we choose to look. If we look at it from freedom point
of view, then I wonder how much freedom we actually have. Connect it with our
likes and it gets quite depressing. In childhood we want to spend time with our
parents and little friends at home but we are sent to school. In teen age we
love to play sports and want to live freely but we are burdened with
competitive exams. And then most of us spend our entire energetic life (below
60 years of age) in office, always working for someone else or for goals set by
our aspirations which are in fact shaped by outside influences. Even
entrepreneurs have to work and they have no choice in this aspect. If we want
to spend all time with family, most of us can’t afford it. Is it a provocative
thought that we can’t “afford” it? We take time “out of” usual work for some
hours, days, weeks, and in case of a few of us, even some years, but we have to
go back to work. Work to earn money. Earn money to survive. Earn money to live.
Struggle to survive is one of the inherent things of this world; it is part of
the package; it comes by design and it seems no one can escape it except those
who follow paths of great souls like Adi Shankar and renounce this world full
of miseries. In fact this world is full of miseries till we are seeking
something. The moment we stop seeking, this world becomes a world full of gifts
and abundance. What an irony…
I
think it is a pity that we have to compromise on what we want and how we want
to spend time just to survive. There are some who take it to the level of
rat-races but no matter how we claim to be “free” most of us are not. In a way
we are slaves to the “ways of life” already set before we arrived here. A
genuine soul search will make us realize this irony. In this aspect all of us
are in the same pool; only the extent to which we are inside water varies… I
know we can think of it as a challenge. How best we can manage our life so that
we have to compromise the least and we enjoy the finer aspects of life and not
only the ones benchmarked for us. Only I am not sure how much we can actually succeed;
and the biggest question is why not fully? Why we are condemned to waste our
life in things as undeserving as working to earn money (no matter how we
glamorize our profession and try to claim it is not about money).
