Category: Purpose

  • Stairway to heaven

    A few days back, I came across a line we had used some time back for a brand campaign, as part of some ambient advertising – “Let’s cut climbing stairs, but not climbing ladders”. That ended up prompting quite a surreal thought.

    Of starting to climb a ladder from the time we’re kids. The first few rungs seem easy, there’s someone helping you, and you know that the same someone is there to catch you when you fall. There are others who are climbing ladders too, your friends, some of whom keep up with you while others choose a faster or slower pace. There are those who will leap, knowing all about high risks and huge rewards. There are those who know exactly how much of effort is required to reach where they want to be, and there are those who are unsure, but still know they’ve to climb.

    At some point, when you have climbed quite a bit, you pause to look.  You might realise that the support you had in the beginning is gone, and perhaps replaced with another one. You would look up, perhaps you now know where you have to go, and the steps and pace required to get there. Or you would look down, and see how far you’ve come up. Or you would look sideways, at friends, family, peers who have been climbing too, you might be tempted to compare and consider your efforts and results against what theirs.

    And then perhaps you would just close your eyes, take a deep breath and look within – at what you have, and what you want to have. Maybe you’ll find yourself dissatisfied and might want to climb a bit more. Or you’ll decide that you quite like the place you’re at, and this is as good a final destination as there can be, you’ll choose to enjoy the view from where you are and perhaps help those who haven’t been able to climb as much as you have, or those who want to climb higher than you have. Maybe you would decide to climb a bit more and then decide.

    The choice would be yours. After all, its your ladder, and your climb, and the top rung is where you decide it will be. The only thing you really don’t know is the journey time.

    until next time, an alarm rung….

  • Keep Walking

    A long time back, almost 4 years ago, after seeing Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya, I’d written about meaning, and purpose, and its relevance in an individual’s life. I guess, as I moved on in life, and feared that time is running out for something, the search for this purpose became more frantic, until I tried to see it in everything that happened to me, and around me. I tried to look at what others were doing, trying to find some parameter of reference. But even if it did exist, it doesn’t seem to be easy to find, and that’s a despairing thought.

    And then, sometime back, this wonderful person shared these lines with me

    “For years, copying other people,
    I tried to know myself.
    From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
    Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
    Then I walked outside.”
    …… Rumi

    And then, I found some more food for thought in Hermann Hesse’ “Siddhartha”. A conversation about searching and finding and the difference between the two approaches. Yes, these seem to be two different approaches, and I thought one was the result of the other. 🙂

    Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.

    When a person searches for something, even something that he defines as a purpose, he focuses on that so much that he is usually oblivious of everything else. It becomes an obsession.

    That really does not mean neglecting every responsibility. But it does mean that I do not automatically categorise experiences as good/bad, useful/not useful etc and be done with it. A mindset change from searching to finding will allow me to look at an experience as just that, and to treat it with more calmness. As one of my favourite tees says, “Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling”

    I guess we all know it, we just need reminders ever so often, because we set goals which we think will ensure happiness… movie this weekend, vacation next month, party tonight…but are we really conscious about the  transient nature of that goal? I’m not going to stop any of it (except for the partying, I never did that anyway:) ), but I will be conscious of its relevance.. and irrelevance  🙂

    until next time, destination nowhere

  • My corner in space.. and time…

    …and it was another Sunday when i lazed around, watched some TV, saw a movie on DVD, blogged, micro blogged, and read. In this case, i finished reading ‘Space’ by James Michener. In case you aren’t familiar with his works, he writes huge sagas, and in this case, he uses human characters and their lives to bring out a tangibility to what was in my mind an abstract – Space. (used in the context of the cosmos)

    I really didn’t do anything world changing, and as most weekends go, this could be classified as a wasted weekend. Of course Calvin would object. To use one of my fave quotes “Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless” or that wonderful “A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend”. Anyway, it led me extrapolate that to the life being lived, especially because these days, i’m coming across a lot of literature built around setting goals, giving a meaning to life, and so on.

    I think we all fight our battles with the universe, and most usually end up choosing comfortable corners from where we proceed to watch the stories unfold. The size of the corners is one of the things that vary with each of us, another is the extent of our activity in these corners. The rest of the world is a blur. Take the things that you are interested in, put them in this corner, and you should get the blurriness of the world I’m talking about. What makes these corners sometimes uncomfortable is our comparison with others’ corners and our perceptions of its comfort. Also our comfort needs vary over time.

    In our corners, what we do is of consequence to a limited number of people. This number is perhaps, the measure by which we end up conferring tokens of greatness on people. A few words in ‘Space’ caught my attention

    ..you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted.

    And that sums up the paradox quite well. What I do is meaningful in the finite time I live in, and is futile in the infinity that I exist in. And as i try to make sense of that paradox, I am also reminded of Floyd’s ‘Time‘. I’d admit that I am frittering my life away, if only I knew what the starting gun was for.

    until next time, keep running… 😐

  • Lost Universes

    Sometime back, I got an email forward – A Violinist in the Metro, about the world famous musician Joshua Bell, who, in 45 minutes, played 6 Bach pieces, with a violin worth $3.5 million, at a metro station in Washington, and collected $32 for the effort. A couple of days back, he had sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats had averaged $100. The incident was a social experiment by Washington Post to check out whether we perceive beauty in a commonplace environment and whether we stop to appreciate it. The findings are a testament of the fast paced life we live, and the things we miss out on.

    But a few other facts in this incident interested me. For one, the crowd segment that paid the most attention to the musician were children. Their parents had to forcibly tug them away. Even if we are cynical and claim that its just curiosity, and not an appreciation of music, I still wonder about our life graph, and the part where we lose our innate curiosity. And its not just curiosity, its innocence, its a lot of other things that we lose on the way.

    When I meet friends from school or college, I sense they’ve changed, and so have I. Attitudes,mindsets, behaviour, all transforming themselves according to the experiences that life throws at us. And because of this, I am not able to relate to them the way I used to at an earlier point in time. A part of me that is perhaps lost forever. Even if I tried to re create it, it would be resisted by the current me.

    The other portion in the incident that interested me was that after the performance, there was no applause or recognition. People just moved on, oblivious to the phenomenon they didn’t perceive. I wonder if Joshua Bell was disappointed. Perhaps, if you’re a musician of that caliber, you would have passed the stage where you needed a stamp of approval. Or is he just like me? An unconfident performer of life, who looks around apologetically if he has upset any balance. Perhaps if i could perform like a carefree child, I could get back the curiosity and the other things that I’ve lost.

    This stream of consciousness reminded me of something I’d read about in the novel Space – a space shuttle’s flight. As it ascends into space, at different levels it discards different parts, parts that were useful to get it to that point, but useless after they’ve served this utility. And after completing the mission that it was sent for, it blazes a path back through the atmosphere, burning all except its core. It lands in a place far away from the place of its origin, and time has passed while all this is happening. In a strange way, it reminded me of the way lives are lived – at massive speeds, too fast to notice the beauty of the vast expanses of space around, to achieve something which is relevant only in a very small context, burning up with the hope that all that is being done is worthwhile, and perhaps in a lost, melancholic way, deciding that since anyway the life is to be lived, might as well live it with a mission, however inadequate it seems.

    until next time, touchdown

  • Shaantam

    A thought that I’ve received for the second time – the first time was during a yoga class, and this time, it was thanks to the book I just finished reading – ‘Mistress’, by Anita Nair, as one of the navarasas that come into play in dance art forms – in this case Kathakali.

    Detachment. Freedom. An absence of desire. A coming to terms with life. When all is done, that is all we all aspire to. Shaantam.

    Now, I’ll not be presumptuous and claim that it applies to all, but it definitely does to me. For a while now, even before learning to articulate it, that has been a task I’d set for myself. The rough aim for me was to be comfortable with myself, and be as emotionless as possible with the judgments of others on my self and actions. I’ve had more failures than successes, but I’m learning. Learning that this state has to be acquired over a period of time. Learning that it can be done only in stages because there are things that one has to do to merely sustain the self in this world. Learning that there are responsibilities. Learning that there’s a time for everything, even for coming to terms with life.

    But for me, the revelation to me in that explanation was the word ‘absence’, while most of  my thoughts and actions had been done to suppress. There is a huge difference.

    The cold and cough that has been plaguing me for the last week made me go for an antibiotic. While it did its work on the trouble makers, the side effect was that my taste buds were rendered inactive. So, though I had a great dinner on Saturday, the desire that used to precede the regular weekend dinners was conspicuous by its absence. I read it as another signal – that the absence of desire is not to be achieved by frontal assaults meant to suppress it. That does more harm than good. The absence is merely a side effect of something far larger in scale, changes in the greater canvass of life, a gradual cleansing process. I shall start again. 🙂

    until next time, merry xmas, and I shall see you next on the first day of the new year