Some days ago my mind harkened back to what it was like for me when I was 21. How did I feel? How did I view the world? Why am I reflecting about how I felt when I was 21. Honestly, our past must cause us to pause and reflect. Most of that reflection is internal, some of it needn't be, which is why I am writing this blog. When I was 21, I was like anybody else of my age, a little ambitious and looking towards the future. The life I had lived before I was 21 had'nt been short of events, I had already learnt a fair bit of hard lessons by then, but my mind hadn't fully cranked up to the experiences I would have in the years since. My 21st year changed it all, nothing happened in that year and yet everything happened, a weird contradiction. Nothing happened to fundamentally alter the direction of where I was and have been headed and yet something happened that caused a paradign shift in my life. A curious contradiction. Many things happen in our life, some of those things have a humanly comprehensible cause and effect relationship with us, but there are others that happen to us seemingly bereft of causality. Sometimes we don't grasp the magnitude of the event that happened and continue living our lives deeply numbed by the our own experience, living our life like aimless zombies. Sometimes we do, and when we do, we start looking for answers. Answers to questions that were in some obscure corner of our mind, questions which we told ourselves, we'd ruminate on, hoping that we wouldn't ever need to answer them. How we deal with ourselves, our own experiences and the things that happened to us, including the things we caused and those we seemingly didn't, fundamentally define our life, they define the decisions we'd take and those we wouldn't. I began serious questioning of the premise of my life at a time when I felt particularly vulnerable, challenged by own reality. Such a situation can manifest itself in one of two ways. Fortunately as I see it, I felt I couldn't stay content any longer without pursing those answers, I considered crucial to my understanding of myself. I had done some of this thinking before, but the way I viewed these questions and how I pursued their answers changed quite radically. Hence the paradigm shift. I learnt the value of human experience. Its funny how the greatest personal troughs often provide the greatest amount of inner inspiration. I was disillusioned before, trying to find my moorings, unsure of my steps, but nevertheless walking slowly and suddenly some of it started making sense and the steps became more sure. Life isn't about getting to the final destination somehow anyhow, its not about winning at any or all costs, its about playing the game on the rules of personal conviction. And it is a deeply personal game with some universal realities. We all came alone and we will all walk away alone and even the most lucky amongst us will find most of the road desolate. We all have to find our own rules, our own games, our own ways of getting good at the game , of accepting victory, digesting defeat all with humility, and foremost of the reality that someday the game will be over and we will be judged for our performance in the game. There is the possibility of earning both a promotion and a demotion. And the people that I have met since the time when I started looking at my own little personal game, have helped me refine my rule book, its also helped me understand that the understanding of our own internal inabilities is crucial in our own inability to master the game. Our own ego manifesting itself in the desire to control those around us, is our greatest inability. It impairs us from making deeper communications with ourselves. At a certain time in my life, after commiting a grave error of judgement which had direct ramifications for some others, I in my mind was blaming others for my follies. On careful reflection I realized that I bore the responsibility for what I thought, said and did, and blaming anybody else but myself for what happened to me, was not appropriate. I also realized that those people around us who choose to interact with us at a deeper than superficial level, give us a deeper insight into who we are. And if we are mindful, we can learn from every experience we have.
The ability to introspect, look within for our own answers, our own rationale for life and while doing so, not judge the world for not sharing our views, adds value to our own experience. Thats not always how I felt, but thats how I started thinking and my experiences and my ability to be alive to that has helped me a lot. My life or mind did not change course overnight, it had been slowly heading in a certain direction, certain experiences accelerated the process.
The process of learning is truly a process, its life-long, its based on what is esentially deep introspection. It is based on internalizing external experiences, on living lfe without the desire to control other's reality, it is the ability to strive, passionately towards something and yet let go. This is a weird paradox. There are things in life, which we can legitimately impact, among those are our thoughts, our speech and our actions, what we can't impact is, how it gets received by somebody else and how they choose to understand it.
Our realization of our own limitations can bring a sense of modesty and a sense of perspective of who or what we are and what we can do to improve ourselves and our world. We cannot hope to stand forever on others shoulders, at some point we have to find our own individuality, our own small, but unique place in the grand scheme of things. An honest assesment of ourselves can only help in that endeavor.
The Human ego like anything else has an inherent duality to it. On the one-hand it brings meaning to our life, it can make us strive towards the most perfect individuals we can be. It can also be a very bad thing, when we do not understand ourselves and the world around us properly. It can sometimes without our own knowledge bring a sense of self-righteousness, a sense of self-persecution and a sense of self-centeredness and self-absorption. When we think that others around us are wrong and we are right in all cases, we have decided to walk through life with blinders on. Its basically a decision to not correct or learn from our past mistakes and to not listen to anybody who may have our best interests at heart, as we have made the decision to view everybody who disagrees with us as our enemies. Its a profoundly disempowering experience when we have decided to not learn from the past, as effectively we have consigned our own past to the waste-paper basket. I wasn't always open myself to this idea, I made mistakes, hurt myself a lot and many others in the bargain and gradually learnt from it. Even as I write this today, there are occassions when I observe myself slipping into the mode of self-righteousness. The only good thing is that when one is aware of one's own mind and behavior, one has better chances of faster and less-destructive self-correction.
When we know that we can be wrong, that its alright to be wrong, as long as we learn from the experience, we are not afraid to err. The funny aspect is that most people err, don't learn and keep falling into the same traps again and again. Its a sad truth but there are certain very negative and personally harmful stereotypes which are enforced by our societies of today. Its conventionally thought that if we show our weakness too much, it will be exploited, that while for the most part true, doesn't as an argument hold good for looking at oneself, it also doesn't take into account those around us who aren't out to get us, or to put it differently who are out to help us grow, improve and understand ourselves better. One of the sad aspects of human society is that people are taught to follow conventions (we are not taught to think or spot exceptions), and in attempting to follow conventions which one often doesn't completely understand, we are not able to or taught to think for ourselves, we are not taught to question, we are not taught to be skeptical of what we see around us and what we see in ourselves. When we are in a position to think, we reach a stage where we can discriminate between our various experiences and at that point we can understand that every person around us isn't out to exploit us, we reach a stage of higher self-awareness, we reach a stage where we can accept love and compassion, be aware of what we are accepting, what we are learning, understanding, absorbing and disseminating. A thinking man, fights against blind faith, he fights against the irrational dogmas, essentially a truly thinking man is an individualist. I don't know why it is hard for many to accept that its alright to feel weak sometimes, to feel vulnerable, to feel sad, to wander the depths of one's own pschyche in search for answers, one doesn't need to feel sad, sorry or make excuses for one's own thoughts, and above all, its alright to be confused, to find one's own mind oscillate between different thoughts, different points of view, after all no man, not even the greatest of us, had it all figured out the day he was born. Only the self-delusional can make any claim of knowing it all, knowledge unravels itself to the discerning mind. The aim of life ought to be , to be that discerning mind, to fight for and seek truth, within and by obvious extension outside. Sometimes societal stereotypes are emphasized and enforced in odd ways, like such catchy punch lines as "We are Born winners"(If you are a born winner, please reveal your DNA configuration, it must be something super-human), "Win at all costs"(how about do the right thing, pursue your passion, don't just look for instant gratification, quick money, quick fame at any cost, oh ofcourse I forget, that was the ethos of a by-gone generation wasn't it. I forget, thats what may be right may not be the most easy thing to do or the most expedient thing), etc etc...People get wired with these societal stereotypes rather quickly, of whats cool and whats not in somebody elses view and then it becomes very difficult to fight such views.
I do not claim, I know it all, what I do claim is that knowledge is no one's person's property, its everybody's to find out, understand, personalize, preserve, enlarge and disseminate. Forgive me, I didn't always sound so old and grumpy, I got there, I just hope I got a bit wiser in the bargain. I guess only time will tell.
