Bliss

Image courtesy: Redorbit

Bliss it was that Santiago experienced when he returned home with the skeleton of the huge marlin fish that he had caught with much difficulty after 84 days of bad luck.  Santiago is the eponymous old man in Hemingway’s classical novel, The Old Man and the Sea.  Bad luck haunted him like a vindictive demon for 84 days.  He couldn’t catch any fish.  But Santiago was not one to give up.  On the eighty-fifth day, he succeeds in hooking the huge marlin.  However, he could only bring home the skeleton of that fish as sharks attacked it incessantly all along the way back.  Santiago did what he could to fight the sharks.  He had dreamt of selling the fish at a high price.  He knew that the people who would eat the fish were unworthy of its greatness. 

There was only the skeleton remaining by the time the old man reached ashore.  “But man is not made for defeat,” as Santiago tells us.  “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

Santiago’s bliss was the reward for his indefatigable spirit which knew to challenge destiny.  He refused to toe the line and run in the prescribed track.  He chose to explore the uncharted waters that lay “out too far.”  He was the luckless man, according to other people.  But he knew well that his “big fish must be somewhere” and he got it by leaving the conventional routes.

If you follow the beaten tracks, you will perform the regular rituals and get the familiar idols.  Remember that the most brutal acts of violence were perpetrated in the name of those rituals and idols.  All those who discovered their personal bliss were people who moved out of the beaten tracks.  The world thought them crazy. 

Be crazy if you want to arrive at your personal bliss, your own paradise.

PS. Written for #BlogchatterA2Z