Just panning it out!

There have been times when we put on a thinking hat, gazed dreamily into emptiness in a dimly lit room for hours together and delved into a train of thoughts only to have rejected them as disillusioned or just not having had the motivation or time or energy to pursue the answer. This is a reflection of one of those times.

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All of us have been through epochs in time when things didn't go as planned. Depending on how short or long these periods were, the experience may have varied from being an interesting twist to the plot, a challenge to address, a hurdle to overcome, a gloomy day in the season, a series of unfortunate events or perhaps stormy weather prolonging the days of agony. While we relished the smaller challenges, we tended to suffer as we plowed through the longer trials. The initial enthusiasm at the opportunity presented by a challenging situation may have deteriorated into days when you just didn't care anymore.

During some of these longer periods of testy days (in recent memory) some random but frequent thoughts on topics that otherwise evade my everyday ritualistic world, like spirituality, meditation, prayer, philosophy and God would fill the void during the evening walks with friends (going through similar phases). These thoughts were the result of a day when you did all you could to make it count, but nothing happened. A string of these days would suggest that you were not in control of your life, while the quintessential truth as you had known it, suggested otherwise. The process of reconciling this cognitive dissonance created a platform that brought together the elements of spirituality, meditation and God. These were ways to balance an equation that was out of whack, add order to randomness and inject sense into events that seemed to have gone awry. I had thought of God frequently before but there was less questioning. Spirituality was just a tool for achieving control of the mind and not the righteous way to true happiness. As these days prolonged, I wondered if our way of life, where everyone did the same thing, in some form, way or shape, where we all spent our time running after pieces of man-made paper inherently accepting a vicious cycle, was really the way to be. I questioned if I was being rational or if I was just rationalizing. Was I looking at the world through a prism?

Finally, when the days of toil came to a happy ending and the solution to the dissonance was finally discovered (that it existed in the first place because I was not running with the rest of the crowd) the spin on it was that the hard work combined with an element of luck had paid off. Quickly, as I adapted to the way of life which I was just questioning earlier, everything seemed to be just fine. The thoughts instantly disappeared as I began to savor the taste of success. The new vigor injected by the turn of events drowned out those questions (although they remained unanswered).

Did we, during the process of evolving to the place we are at now, discover this to be the best approach to achieving fulfillment in one's lifetime? Or was the potential of the less traveled paths just dismissed because they weren’t just as appealing? Is the ignominy of our indulgence rather a blessing in disguise? The questions linger on.

-Vijayasarathy-