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, March 28, 2019
 

I couldn’t help but wonder how sometimes we obsess over something that is missing in our lives, something if it were present would make our lives perfect, and something that we wish we could have…and then we imagine how life would be if we had it. Because we are so intently focusing on this ‘missing’ element, we don’t realise the value of the thing that we do have and that is making our present life pretty pleasant, if only we thought about it instead of the missing thing. It is only when this particular thing is on the verge of vanishing that it hits us that life wasn’t bad at all owing to this thing and maybe we could have actually enjoyed ourselves a bit more instead of worrying. And then we start to think of how life would be when this thing now vanishes and probably this becomes the next thing that you keep obsessing and worrying about instead of maybe learning the moral of the story…which is, that there might be something or the other that makes life worth living and we probably need to reflect on what that is rather than reflecting on what we’re missing… and count ourselves lucky to have it while we do.
To share an example: Ever since I arrived in the UK I have been wishing to make some like-minded friends with whom I could have the sort of warm friendship that makes one miss one’s family less. But as anyone who lives in the real world knows, this is a tall order at the best of times. I have generally been unlucky in the friends department…maybe this merits another blog to reflect on the whys and wherefores but one main reason could be that in Mumbai I certainly wasn’t surrounded by the likes of people I would want to be friends with. I did wonder if things might be different here but again the combination of circumstances I am in (what with research being highly isolating and all that) isn’t very conducive to making friends. I felt this was the one thing missing in my life that could potentially make everything so much more enjoyable. I somehow did not even notice much less appreciate or value the one or two good friendships that I did make because they didn’t map to this idealised version of friendship. I was pining for the ‘imaginary’ friendships so much so that I completely lost sight of the immense value that these real friendships brought into my life and that I almost took for granted. It was only when I learnt that I might be losing these friends very soon that it hit me… that in fact I had been lucky to have made these friendships, and if I had thought about it, they had actually made my life so much more pleasant.
I feel that instead of focusing on the non-existent elements in my life I need to try to look for beauty and harmony in what exists. Maybe then I will be able to savour life for what it is rather than in retrospect for what it was or for what it could be… It seems to me that this is probably a symptom of the human condition (or at least this one human’s condition ;)) that we seem to be perpetually caught in…we are not happy ‘in the moment’ because we are looking to the past with wistfulness or to the future with anxiety…we yearn for what we don’t have and when we get it we no longer value it or we don’t value what we do have and yearn for it after we have lost it!
 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 12:11 am 0 comments
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