Perspectives

I wake up every morning to some WhatsApp messages from friends and well-wishers. 

“There are only two ways of living life,” suggested one such message this morning, “Walk like you are the King or walk like you don’t care who the King is.”  The very next one from another friend (who messages me very rarely) belonged to the spiritual realms as usual: “In pride, in reas’ning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the bless’d abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods.”

The first message came from a friend who has entrepreneurial ambitions while the sender of the second one has spiritual aspirations. The first friend, presumably, sends bulk messages to all in the mailing list every morning and hence the messages may not be meant for me personally.  The second friend takes a personal interest in me as all spiritually ambitious people do.  Entrepreneurship is about managing the masses while spirituality is about saving individual souls.

Your ambition or goals in life determine your actions.  Ambitions being diverse, we are destined to face contradictory messages particularly in the social media.  One message asked me to be the King one way or the other while the second one advised just the opposite.  [I wonder why the vowels were replaced with the apostrophe in that message in two key words.] The first one seeks to boost our pride while the second one douses it because pride is a serious sin in religions. 

I smiled at both the messages as usual and went on with my morning chores such as watering my roses and aralias which have neither political nor spiritual aspirations like me.  The messages meant nothing to me because I have a different perspective which has nothing to do with achievements, especially political (being the King) or spiritual (being the Saint).  Yet people have always thought of me as a vainglorious man and hence offered all kinds of spiritual or psychological guidance most of which meant nothing to me.

The best treatment I got was from my last principal in the Delhi school who kept me at a distance assuming I was “pagal.”  At least he didn’t try to heal my insanity.  He was entitled to his perspective just as much as my other good friends are.  Perhaps even more so because he left me alone.