The Chosen Path

It's been really long since I wrote anything. I sometimes think it's because I am not getting inspired enough from my life, or probably it's because I have just been lazy and have not really tried to collect my thoughts and pen them down, or simply because in this metallic monotonous life, where the world revolves around money, getting settled, making a home and just going with the flow, I have learned to do the same, forgotten the simple pleasure of writing, what is there to be written.

Not every one's life has a classic plot of revenge, redemption, or love, lust, passion and adventure. Not everyone has a life that could become a bestseller if written as a book. The majority of us have been predestined to lead simple good or gray ordinary lives, which we mean to live honestly and truthfully or not to the best or worst of our abilities, until we come face to face with death. Death of either our loved ones or ourselves.

And then we realize.! We realize that the time is less. Many of us almost magically and instantly forget this simple lesson and live on like nothing has ever happened. Some of us get disillusioned and waste the remainder of our lives, and that leaves behind a small group, a small group of people who decide to seek answers to this mindless design, this endless and colourful myriad maze where no one really bothers to find an exit.

Perhaps those who forget and move on, are right. Life is to be lived in the present, but life can surely provide experiences and clues to some of the burning questions our souls seek to find. This is something that cannot be taught, for the paths are all different and unique, leading to the same great truth. Our paths have to be decided by each and every one of us ourselves. In Hermann Hesse's book, Siddhartha, the protagonist is also searching for answers and lives the life of an ascetic until he meets the Budha himself, “The Enlightened one”. While Siddhartha's friend, Govinda decides to stay with Budha and follow his teachings, Siddhartha instead questions the Budha, about his path to Enlightenment and then goes on to provide a perfectly logical explanation of why he does not intend to stay. The Enlightened one can teach all that he knows, but his followers will ultimately have to strive and find their own paths and ways to get enlightened.

The story is undoubtedly fictional, but there is an element of truth all the same. Finding out the paths, we need to walk upon and treading down those paths carefully is what life's success is all about. If one finds that gaining all material wealth is his/her chosen path, then so be it. If some one decides that total renunciation of all wealth all life's other vices is his/her chosen path, then so be it. If some one decides that helping society and human kind is his/her chosen path then so be it. And if some one else decides that simply living life as it comes is his/her chosen path, then so be it.

Because no one's idea of life can be out rightly rejected. It takes a bird' eye view to see a lot and yet one might not have seen all. When the skies turn dark and punishing and nature unleashes it's fury during monsoon, or when earth turns parched and broken due to the sheer heat, it takes again a whole different perspective to appreciate life for what life is.

When I was a child, I have always thought about success. Initially it seemed like good academic learning was success. Later I thought it was fame and riches, then I thought it was knowledge and again later I thought that turning all my dreams I had as a child into reality would make me successful. But then I started learning about relationships and how you have to invest time and affection to make them successful and searched for my own success in the same. All of this does seem to be right, and yet the emptiness and yearning for more still remains.

I have to write and keep writing until my chosen path shall appear for me to walk on, So be it!.