Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Irony of life and its achievements



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).

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