Even mundane events can teach you a lesson or two on intelligent living

 Some of Life’s most trivial events offer an opportunity to learn to drop your ego.

Both our domestic helps quit on the same day last week. It was a very bizarre turn of events. They were well paid – despite our enduring bankruptcy – and the work conditions were above normal standards, meals, local conveyance and work-related incentives. But, as it turns out, they quarreled with each other and both quit saying they will not work with the other! Worse, both of them continue to be unreachable and I believe each of them assumes that the other is still working with us! This development comes at the most inopportune time for us. My father-in-law, who suffered a stroke two weeks ago, has been very ill and is being looked after in our home with 24-hour nursing care. The agency supplying the home nurses has been very inefficient, irresponsible and unresponsive. Resultantly, many a time, we are left without a nurse or with the same nurse doing more than one shift. The stream of (non-family) visitors calling on us to look up my father-in-law only confounds an already stressful situation.

This may appear to be a very trivial situation – a commonplace occurrence in most of our homes! But when I examined the event closely, it offered me some deep spiritual insights. 

The first one is that at the bottom of it all, Life is impermanent and illogical. Our domestic helps abruptly stopping to work, only reinforces that truism. What happens to you and in your Life need not necessarily be a function of how good you are. Anything can happen, absolutely anything, whether or not you caused it or contributed to it in any manner. The second one is that not everyone needs to share your value systems. The person who runs the nursing agency has no sense of customer focus and is only intent on demanding a steep fee for a service that he hardly delivers! Trying to make him see reason, I discovered, is futile. So, the only way forward in such a situation is that when the value systems don’t sync, you simply move on. Third, you can’t control people and their behaviors. At best you can control the way you react to people and situations. This is the only way to retain your inner peace and sanity. And finally, when you resist whatever is happening to you – whether it is fair or not, right or wrong, is hardly relevant in Life’s scheme of things – you will suffer. For a good four days, despite my evolved perspective of Life, I struggled to accept the reality that confronted us; that we were dealing with a bunch of people who were illogically, irrationally, playing truant with us! As long as I resisted this reality, I found myself stressed. But then when I sat down over the weekend and thought through all the developments peacefully, calmly, and accepted what we were faced with, I was able to regain my equilibrium.  

I finally concluded that this domestic crisis of sorts was actually a very humbling experience. It helped me drop my ego. Why do I need to demand that we must be treated better? Why do I insist that we deserve better? Why expect? I realized, yet again, that only when all expectations cease, can there be complete inner peace.