To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Thursday, October 18, 2018
 

Do you ever get this vague feeling that you are the hero or heroine or protagonist in this movie of your life? Not in a narcissistic, self-obsessed way…but in a rather philosophical sort of way. As if all you can be sure about in this sea of humans, places, things, thoughts is your own self, your body, your mind? 
When I was a kid, and I would come back from my summer vacation in Mangalore to Mumbai….I loved Mangalore very much and missed everyone and ached to be with them…I would wonder if people in Mangalore really did exist. I am right now here and doing whatever I am doing, are they too going about their lives and sundry things and thinking about me…or is it that the world is just me and whatever is around me…what I can see and hear….maybe everything else is a blank…how would I know because I can’t see or hear anything beyond…it could very well be all dark and quiet…  
I find it strange that I used to think this as a kid but I guess that kids tend to be more natural philosophers than adults because we have hardened into accepting the world. We no longer look at things with wonder and ask ourselves questions about the nature of things. We simply take everything for granted and go about our everyday business in a world of our own creating…rarely stopping to ask ourselves if this world is real… obviously it doesn’t matter to us because whether it is real or not, I have to go to work because I have to earn because I have to eat. My asking these questions will not feed me and if I am not fed I will die. My own body and mortality at least is very real to me…that there is no doubt about (though one has a lot of doubt about what really happens after death).
Which is where my analogy of the movie comes in. Do you ever feel like you’re a central character in this life movie where everything is somehow revolving around you and that everything will turn alright for you in the end… you don’t know the ending of this movie but you do know that it ends well for the main character, right? Or maybe if you’re a pessimist you might say that it may not end ‘well’ in a conventional sense. I think thinking about it as a movie also helps to give it some sort of structure and meaning… you know, the beginning, middle, end thing. It doesn’t seem as chaotic…whoever heard of a movie where random things happened randomly and that’s that. There had to be a moral of the story somewhere or a silver lining or something. Well… I don’t know… whether life does have meaning or not (question we will keep taking up on this blog as you’re well aware!) but what harm would it do to think it does have meaning? What’s the harm if it helps you ‘live more meaningfully’ which is probably to say more responsibly, more ethically? I don’t see the harm… do you?

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 8:17 pm 0 comments
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