An Attempt to Live

I have been trying to define life for a very long time. All this started when I felt pain for the first time, I don’t remember the reason for my pain, but I was suffering. I was trying to see through it and had some realizations. When I am ill I can see that I’m in pain and my body is not working as it should, but it doesn’t affect my mind. I can still choose to smile. At moments others can’t even tell if I am unwell. The only way they could know is to see my running nose, find me sneezing or touch my face and see that I’m burning. There have been other times when I’ve been in emotional pain. These feelings are yet more subtle. It feels like everything is fine around but the mind is not at rest. It is unsettled about something. On closer inspection, I saw that whenever my mind is disturbed I have a series of thoughts, uncontrolled, which leads me to all the suffering. But that was about suffering and not feeling good, but what of life? How do you define life?

Do you have a definition of life? Yesterday I was pondering on the same question and came to very good imagery. If I am an hourglass, filled with sand. The hourglass has two halves. The one above signifies when we are alive. The one below signifies death. The moments in our life are the fine grains of sand which are constantly moving from being alive and dead. The process never stops. A grain is born the moment it starts the motion. It has a journey to travel. This journey is life. All the experiences this grain collects. All the people it will see, all the feelings it will ever feel and all the love it will ever give. There is a life in the moment. Such small, tiny moment makes up the life and in turn, makes us. But wait, where is the suffering?

Suffering is when the grain of sand wants to hold on to the motion, it denies the fact that it has to move from life to death. This causes conflict and this will cause pain. Why do you even think that it hurts us when the person we love leave us? Why incidents in the life of a person somewhere far we haven’t seen doesn’t affect us in any way? We forget most of the time that death is inevitable. Death is not just the ceasing of life. Death has many forms. Everything in the world is born and thus everything must die. A feeling is born as you read this paragraph. The feeling will die after some time. When a mother sees her child or when a young lad holds her beloved for the first time in the warm embrace, a relation is born. So by the law of nature what has born will die. The person whom we didn’t know until now has so much importance in our life. If they are hurting we hurt and their action, in turn, effects our mood and feelings. Will that person never change? Will that person never cease to exist? We all know the universal law and the answers to these questions. Yet we all try to be ignorant. Thinking that something will last forever.

Unfortunately, this is also the reason why relation ends. Why a child hurt his parents. The false sense of longevity reduces the value of things we have. Just imagine if you knew that you had few days left to live. Will it be the same way we are living currently? I would definitely say no. Just acknowledging the truth about life and death can revolutionize the way we think and function. I’ve always tried and I always try to be aware of the end. It helps me be a better person. I’m still not perfect, I know I will never be. I have a lot of weaknesses and I can just try to improve. All I want is to be a better person to be with. Happiness for my family and people around me.

Just remembered an incident about the time when I eat dinner and lunch at my room or office. I’m used to eating chappati. So if you know, in a hot box the chappati at the top tends to get harder compared to ones below. So I always took the few from below so that I always get the soft ones. ;) So one day doing the same thing, I felt bad. Will I do the same thing with my father? my mother or anyone at my home? I would never do it. I would always want the best of things for them and then for myself. Then why am I like this in some places? I am still trying to answer these question. O.o