From Desires, Through the Differences to Acceptance

I often imagined that before coming into existence, I was a breeze flowing past this planet without my current senses. I touched upon millions of objects from this planet and wanted to manifest my longing to experience them through my senses. Being born was perhaps the only goal for me then.

Funny thing is when one mission gets accomplished, we often find out that’s like a game going one level up.

So, after being born into a human existence, what’s the next goal? Well, I don’t actually know this time…

What are we here for? What’s the purpose of this existence? According to most people, life is what we make out of it.

Somehow we know this deep down in our hearts, too, but not really digest its full meaning until we are older or even accept it.

Without any manual, one often looks around and tunes themselves into the themes of our surroundings and get somewhere. Some are lucky to know themselves and pursue a goal that appeals to them. Some simply run and try to chime into the rhythm of life that is expected of them— some are able to sync and some do fail to tune themselves.

Then, again, while singing in this choir of life, suddenly we start to reflect on our life’s achievements and do an evaluation.

What I expected my life to be and where am I? It could well be the case that we may have achieved all that we wanted.

But, alas, as Tagore said in the poem Mareechika, “all that I want, I want them by mistake and all that I’ve received, I don’t want them any longer”.

যাহা চাই তাহা ভুল করে চাই,

যাহা পাই তাহা চাই না

Funny thing is anything we want is a mirage. When we reach a destination or a life’s goal, the value of it diminishes, simply by the fact of me attaining them. Perhaps, we should have the grounding to appreciate our luck and fortune to be where we have reached. 

Practicing to be content, I find, is quite a hard work. If I simply could do a balance sheet every day between things that I tried to do (possibly to make things better for the people and world around me) and how much I have accomplished and be satisfied, life would be so blissful— every day.

Yet, from moment to moment, expectations arise from somewhere deep. Then, I feel hurt by not finding the world around me tuning to the song my heart wants to sing and hear, too! I find every individual singing their own song they created in their heads and they are all different. What we perceive others as, is not what they are really like. My lens is different to yours. We are dealing with images of everyone’s according to our own conditioned minds.

Sometimes, it feels like we are the pieces of a very large puzzle who are given the tasks of self-identification and fitting themselves appropriately into this big, buggy world. And, we are not succeeding…

Learning to accept the differences is such a hard task. Empathy is not something we learn in schools, colleges or universities. A sense of self-interest propels us and then while running like hell through the days of our lives, we forget where we were going.

Perhaps, all of us need a bit of re-alignment, take a stocktake of our lives, and re-think the lives of ours and others, then decide what we can do so that we leave a world that befits our children and their descendants.

Doing this in small scale is what I can do and so can you! I really hope that makes a difference, since it’s never going to happen top-down, ie, sense of goodness is not going to be posted to our addresses by the governments of this world.