This is such a strange sensation. It is like running continuously without even stopping to breathe. Or like swimming underwater without an oxygen cylinder and mask and without surfacing for a long time. Or like going through the hordes of tasks without sleeping or eating or shitting or drinking or even listening to a piece of heavenly music. Or like…hell…let me at once make clear what I am talking about.
No, this is not a rat race; for there isn’t much competition here and you are not forced to run either. This is no race for money, name or fame or power. No. This is a quest for understanding. Understanding self. Understanding the world. Trying to make out (this so sounds like an intercourse!) an order amongst the chaos of this so-called world. This unending quest is tiring, maddening and frightening at times.
The so-called world is full of myths and millions and billions lives end without even realizing this. Yes, there are myths everywhere. The mankind, for example is no ‘kind’ kind as a whole. The world we call our world is never ours. The beasts are seldom cruel. The white is no white, it needs seven damned wavelengths of seven colors to make it white. Some call this science, some paradoxes, I prefer myths; because you need to break every wrong belief to reach and uncover the right one. One of the cherries on this mythical cake is education; especially schooling which so rarely educates in true sense. It succeeds in creating and building newer myths more often than in breaking the old stinky ones.
Anyway, so we were talking about a quest. For understanding. Everything. This quest started from a juncture I cannot ascertain. And it has engulfed my entire being. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I do? Where do I go? Why is reality real? Why is fiction more beautiful than facts? What can I do to make it better?
Gosh! Look at the size of the questions; and I am addressing all of them, all at once. No wonder it is draining every living drop of energy from my brains and my body. And while it has brought me around to some really insightful answers, these answers themselves have created even more complicated questions and challenges.
Which answers to which questions? and what more complications? Damn this self-obsessed banter that leaves the listener in a tangled maze of riddles.
Well, this quest has brought me to truly understand and accept that:
World is an unfair place. Equality and Freedom cannot, repeat, cannot, live a happily married life. Ever. They marry only to be divorced soon. Humans love structures, orders, systems. AND they love Breaking these even more. Life is caught in duels. Paradoxes. Opposing forces everywhere. Between, for example, ‘living in the moment’ and ‘acting in favor of long-term well-being’. There is an unending list of such ‘betweens’. and so on…
But the point is different here. This unending quest is tiring, maddening and frightening at times. Yes. I wish I had never learned to question or find answers. It would have been a peaceful existence. No, I am not a pessimist, mind you. I need to learn to relax, to stop comparing between ‘what is’ and ‘what is must be’, to pause, to allow myself some imperfections and shortcomings, to forgive myself, to forgive the world and the people around. And take a bite of life sweet and sour and hot; and a swig from the bottle of ‘letting go’; and a nap on the wings of moments stolen from the stern shores of time; lying down with my face buried in the breasts of life.
Then I will rise and face. The quest, the reality, the life and the death and all the glorious questions of existence.
I believe I might…!
-Makarand
Makarand Pathak 