Skip to main content

Mystery of the Unknown



Crises are an integral part of human life.  Doubts, anxiety and even despair seize us mercilessly sometimes.   They can be excellent opportunities for personal growth, provided we deal with them effectively.

Personal growth calls for some change.  It may be a change of attitudes, environment, job or something else. 

Most of us don’t like change.  Change frightens us with the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies it.  Psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp wrote 4 decades ago (in his book, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’) that the neurotic who comes to a therapist doesn’t want to change himself.  “His goal is to become a more effective neurotic.”  He doesn’t want to give up his neurotic feelings and attitudes because he is scared of the changes that would ensue.  He would rather have his neuroticism and have the therapist make him feel more comfortable with it. 

Change is  challenge to face the unknown.  The misery of the familiar is preferred to the mystery of the unknown.   Life is hard here, but at least I know the terrain and its pitfalls – that’s the thinking.  Will I ever get to know the new terrain equally well?

I was faced with that situation in 2001.  And I gathered enough courage to call it quits.  It took me a while to get used to my new environment which was almost entirely different from the previous one.  Then I got used to it.  “Man is a vile creature; he gets used to anything,” says Dostoevsky’s protagonist in Crime and Punishment

But we don’t have to get used to anything.  We are free to call it quits at any time, provided such an action is necessary, and move to yet another unknown reality.   It is not desirable to prefer the misery of the familiar to the challenge of the unknown, if the familiar is bogging you down. 


Blind alleys appear at certain phases of life’s journey.  We should keep searching for the exit, for the light that shimmers somewhere in the darkness.  But if there’s no light in sight, if there’s no reason to look for it any more, what shall we do?  When everything seems lost, if we care to listen, we can hear the gentle creak of the door of hope opening somewhere.  I do hear it.  


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. It needs courage to find an exit. Gets difficult at times but nothing's impossible.

    Please read and share your valuable opinion over: http://namratakumari.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/namo-bharat/

    Happy Republic Day! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Its a coincidence that i am also planning to write my next post on Change My comp.was not working,now its fixed,will try to post by tomorrow.Happy Republic Day to you.And btw,good read

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Looking forward to reading your view on change... I reciprocate your R Day greetings.

      Delete
  3. Ah well.... I can tell u I simply detest changes. It is a psychological thing I know. But I even find it hard if my mom places my clothes or books at a different drawer or almirah dan wat I m accustomed to

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not just you, Ritesh, most people find change abhorrent. The fact, however, remains that change can sometimes work miracles.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...