Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Life is all about living

For the sake of convenience let’s assume I met this lady, who is in her fifties, somewhere in my life and we were talking about something which ended up about war.

I saw some news, it seems some blast in your country. Is it war? She asked.

Well it’s not war, as countries fight, but some fundamentalist and terrorist organization, I told her.

“War is bad, too bad”, she continued. They will give a warning and will drop the bombs. I was a kid. 10 years old. I was in street for shopping. One such sound came. People were running. I don’t know what to do. I saw a shop owner closing his shop. I went in. I was a small kid. Her hands were showing a small height, and her eyes were lost somewhere. So he allowed inside and closed the door. There was a heavy sound of shells dropping and guns shooting (actually she made the sound). Then after 10 minutes no sound. The shop owner opened the door slightly and saw outside. He asked me to wait for some time then after an hour he opened the door and asked me where I Live. I told it’s just few blocks away. I came out. Its dead bodies on street. I saw my parents searching for me in them. When I used to go to school, I will see these dead soldiers in age of 13 or 17 outside the church . It will disturb me. It still disturbs me. I take medicine. I talk with people, consult doctor otherwise I may get depressed. If I saw any such news in TV, my husband will switch off the TV. Suddenly in night I may wake up, because I may hear the shooting sound and the light that chased me when I tried to escape. If my son plays music loud, I ask him to reduce. I don’t know why there is war but war is bad.

I don’t know what to say. I simply saw her. She was regaining her control. She said life is going. When I landed in this country, it was cold, I was having no winter dress, I am standing in bus stop and I don’t know the language. Then I said to myself If I have to live here I shall first learn the language then some education to work. Now I am here.

Something got into my stomach, but at the same time I felt how lucky I was. I was not born in a place torn by war or by poverty or by natural disaster. It doesn’t mean nothing could happen in future. It simply means so far so good. I sit here and cry about my rat race failures: the guy next to me bought a house or got promoted or got ....,what not, while there are millions and millions of people who aren’t sure of the next day (and even if it happens it means nothing to them). I am not talking about getting complacency or renunciation of worldly desire or the emotional black mail ( you are in a better position than them). The thing that I am trying to drive to myself is: Life is not fair. Lot of things happens; you attribute it to chaos, probability or the God. But move on. That lady tried four times to escape and got and finally landed in a country with no money, no language. Now she is self standing women with a caring husband and nice kid. Yes, she is still tormented by her memories, but she never surrendered to it. She had her kept her spirits high. The spirit, the life, keeping it alive is the activity one is supposed to do. It’s what living is all about. Everyone has a way of doing it. Its not the end result, he gets in it that keeps his spirit, it is the process of doing it. The end result is a tiny moment. The process, the means, that’s where we spend most of our time. If you are not happy about it, it doesn’t matter what you get at end. Lot of things can decide how it turns it out but nothing stops u from doing it except you.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

...seems u r becoming a "Karma Yogic " !!! :)

Reeta said...

That was a good one..Happy to see such blogs from you :)

It is true that most of the time we decide our actions based on the expectant results. We are too much worried abt the results that we dont put in the necessary effort to make things happen.

Anonymous said...

A nice thoughtfull blog...

Lakshmi.. said...

Quite inspiring!Your style of writing is very gud..Keep up d gud wrk!

Anonymous said...

"Its not the end result, he gets in it that keeps his spirit, it is the process of doing it. The end result is a tiny moment. The process, the means, that’s where we spend most of our time. If you are not happy about it, it doesn’t matter what you get at end"

- felt these words often linger my thoughts recently on different occasions . Good article indeed...