How I learnt to live with insecurity

All our insecurity is a direct outcome of our conditioning. If we drop our conditioning and accept the Life we have, we will at peace with the insecurity that abounds!

A friend called me this morning to congratulate me on my forthcoming Book – “Fall Like A Rose Petal – A father’s lessons on how to be happy and content while living without money” (Westland, August 2014). After he wished my book all success, he remarked, “AVIS, you have learnt to live without money. But don’t you ever feel insecure?”

I found my friend’s question very pertinent. Here’s what I told him.

To be sure, I too felt insecure when I first came face to face, eight years ago, with the reality that we were insolvent and our Firm was bankrupt. Of course, I was devastated by the gravity of our crisis and was very, very scared of where we would end up in Life. But resisting the insecurity, wishing that things were different, only made me suffer. And in my suffering I could not focus. I was always unhappy. When you don’t focus or are unhappy, how can you function? How can you think of even attempting to solve your problems? While I could make sense of the futility of my suffering, I didn’t know where to start or what to do. What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

That’s when I came across Osho’s, the Master’s, view of insecurity. He has said: “We are all trained in the wrong way. Otherwise, security is something to be afraid of, and insecurity is something to be rejoiced. What exactly is insecurity? It means tomorrow is not going to repeat today. It means tomorrow you may not even be alive. It means that one has to live each moment as if it is the last moment. A Life of security will be simply boring. It will be like seeing the same movie again and again and again -- knowing every detail of what is going to happen. Insecurity is the very fabric of Life. If you don't understand insecurity, you can never understand Life. Everything will go on changing, nothing can be taken for granted; this is insecurity. You want everything to be certain, permanent. But have you ever thought what will be the outcome of it if everything is permanent? You eat the same food every day, you say the same things every day, you listen to the same things every day. Insecurity keeps people fresh, alive, adventurous -- knowing that things can be changed. Even without their changing them, they are going to be changed. So there is great scope for change, for transformation.”

Osho’s perspective indeed changed my entire outlook to Life. I decided to play the game of Life – rather than see it as a complex problem that I didn’t know how to fix. Soon, the game became an adventure. I saw that each day held something new – a legal twist here, an irate creditor who had lost patience with our situation there, bills to be paid for essential services like electricity and telephones when there was no money to even buy groceries, a health situation to be urgently addressed; yet each time we thought it was all over, help arrived from some unexpected quarter. No day, I discovered, was the same. Honestly, not all the stuff that came our way on a daily basis, however new or fresh it was, was appetizing. But however much I felt wasted at the end of each day, I woke up afresh and anew the next day. And took that day’s challenges head-on. Over time, it became clear to me that Life has all along been, and will continue to be, insecure. Now, I didn’t have that sense of security that a steady income could provide, yet when I stopped feeling insecure about it, and let go, and let Life take over, things happened on their own. I have learnt that my duty is to make my daily efforts and let the results take care of themselves. Even so, I don’t deserve, nor do I claim, any credit for the way I have learnt to live my Life. I just chose to accept the Life I got and I have. Why would anyone want a crisis, and as in my case, a state of acute cashlessness and worklessness – especially over the last 24 months?

This numbing phase of my Life has taught me to live with insecurity. There are days, several times in a month, when we really don’t know what will happen or how we will be able to provide for basics like groceries or public transport?  But we know fully well that we will be taken care of. Maybe this is what they call faith. Not in an external God. But in Life itself – that if you have been created and you are in whatever situation you are placed in, you will be cared for, provided for and looked after. This faith makes me – and my wife – last one day more, sleep well, and wake up the next day hopeful and ready to work harder at turning our situation around. This faith helps me be at peace with myself despite all that the insecurity that surrounds me.