Life is incredible, beautiful,
inscrutable and miraculous. Only when we try to make meaning out of it do we
agonize.
There are many situations in Life
where logical explanations are not possible. We can either accept whatever is
happening, choosing to live in complete amazement of the Universe’s ways. Or we
can question, challenge and grieve over our inability to explain why certain
things are happening the way they eventually are.
You may face a challenging
situation for several reasons. You may invite the challenge upon yourself __
like drinking and driving, and crashing your car, for instance. Or you may walk
into one __ like quitting a job and taking another one only to realize that
your employer is a fly-by-night operator and by the time you bail out, you have
lost the momentum and opportunity spectrum in the market. Or something may
befall you __ like a death in the family in the most unexpected circumstances
or at the most inappropriate times. When Life decides to stir your story just a
wee bit, perfectly happy marriages could be ruined and very families could be
thrown in disarray. In all of these, and other, situations while you may
imagine that things are happening only to you and may grieve asking either
‘why’ or ‘why me’, there’s no denying the fact that what has happened would
have happened any which way. Life operates with a mind of its own. It doesn’t
have any specific intention to fix you. It just goes on with a plan that’s been
ordained for you, a plan that you will never quite understand or know in its
entirety until you have lived through the Life that you are ready to review! The
most intelligent way, therefore, to deal with Life is to just accept it,
surrender to it and to never question it or its rationale.
Things never change overnight because you accept them or
choose a higher path! They just become simpler__not necessarily easier__to
handle. You are, with surrendering to Life, better off than fighting Life.
Because a fight is always spewing negative energy. It is always about brute
force. When you try to untangle a ball of knotted up wool, impatiently, by
tugging at it from all sides, the mess will only become worse. Instead, calm,
patience, diligence will help.
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| Pi and Richard Parker: Peaceful Mates |
In the movie ‘Life of Pi’, Pi faces up to Life’s inscrutable
ways with an equanimity which comes with understanding the futility of fighting
Life. His initial period of helplessness and brute force, resisting his
situation, does not yield him any results. He concludes that he can survive his
ordeal only when he surrenders to Life’s grand design. At the same time, he
resolves to do what is in his capacity, which is to make peace with Richard
Parker, the tiger. He works on establishing a method of communicating with the
tiger and training it to understand that co-existence was the only way forward
for both of them! That was his diligence. His application of thought in what he
could possibly do. So, surrendering to Life does not mean giving up. It means
giving in, while doing whatever is possible.
Most situations in Life are pretty much like that. They are
Catch 22s __ where the game is not over and there is still something, however
small, that you can be doing to stay in the game. It is when we mistake these still
workable, still doable situations to be ones where we are check-mated, that we encounter
grief and misery. In a check-mate, the game’s over. In a Catch 22, the game is
still on! With a check-mate you are usually dead. If you are alive, it is only
a Catch 22.
So, hang in there. However incredible your story may be, stop
analyzing and trying to make meaning out of your present state. Just know that in
the end you will prevail. And when you look back, like Pi does in the movie,
you will find that it all happened to make you richer from the experience and
wiser from the learning!
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