Skip to main content

Janus

By Loudon Dodd


Janus is a Roman god with two faces that look into opposite directions.  The month of January gets its name from Janus.  Probably the calendar makers thought that the new year should prompt us to look back at the past year as we welcome the new year.  The past is a good teacher.  Those who refuse to learn from their past are condemned to repeat it. 

But the past may not always be the ideal teacher.  If you have a tendency to ask yourself why this happened to you, the past is better forgotten.  Most of the time, there are no answers to the question why.  Things go wrong as they often do.  Wrongs outnumber rights in our life.  We often err.  Others err too.  Errors hit us from every side all the time.  We’ve got to accept them as inevitable parts of life, as faithful companions.

Learn the lessons from those errors and move ahead.  Like Janus, look back only to remember the lessons.  Forget the hurts and the pains.  Forget the whys.  Ask how.  How can I solve this problem that I am facing now?  If the past experiences can help, look back at them.  If they cannot, look ahead.  Never ask: Why did this happen to me?  Ask: How can I solve this now?

The past and the future are like the two faces of Janus.  They look into opposite directions.  And both are there, whether you like it or not.  Which one are you going to use more?  That’s the question.  And the answer is vital.

Philosopher Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”  Understand, but move on.  If you are stuck in the past, how will you move ahead into the future?

What makes us stuck in the past is some pain, some hurt, some memory.  Tonight when you wake up during your sleep, when everyone else at home is fast asleep, when the world around is very quiet, imagine that a miracle happens.  A miracle happens to you.  A fairy or an angel or your god appears to you and says, ‘Your problem is gone.’  Just imagine.  The fairy won’t come.  But we can create the fairy in our imagination.  Just imagine that your problem is solved.  How is your life going to be different after your problem is solved?  Start living that life from the morning.  Sometimes miracles are as simple as that.

Let Janus keep both the faces.  The present miracle can change the past too. Janus is the god of endings and beginnings.  Some old things have to end so that new things can begin.

PS. #BlogchatterA2Z - Letter J

Comments

  1. wingsApril 12, 2018 at 9:33 PM

    Living in the present is truly challenging!

    ReplyDelete
  2. CRDApril 12, 2018 at 11:24 PM

    This is such a perfect interpretation of Janus' forward looking while keeping an eye on the past. Loved reading this.

    Interestingly, I read somewhere that perhaps Janus and Ganesh are the same, because Janus also happens to be depicted in the form of an elephant.

    Cheers,
    CRD
    Scripted In Sanity

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 13, 2018 at 8:07 AM

      I'm not aware of Janus being depicted as an elephant. But he is supposed to usher in prosperity.

      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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more