Skip to main content

Yes to Reality

At Allahabad Triveni Sangam
where I said Yes to one of the harshest realities of my life


“I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.” Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the UNO wrote those words just four months before his death in 1961.

Saying Yes to reality is a self-surrender. Unless you can surrender yourself to both the joys and sorrows of life, both hope and despair, light and darkness, you can’t say Yes to reality. Your triumph in life is a catastrophe and the catastrophes of life are triumphs when you say Yes to reality. Your Yes to reality carries you to the realisation that “the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation” (Hammarskjold’s words).

There is no greatness in life that is not tainted with some obscurity and there is no darkness that is not touched by a ray of light. “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” as Shelley said. Our most bitter sadness carries in its deepest core an alluring joy.

Saying Yes to reality calls for fundamental trust from us. Catholic theologian Hans Kung says that “Fundamental trust means that a person, in principle, says Yes to the uncertain reality of himself and the world, making himself open to reality…” (Does God Exist?) Life is persistently and menacingly uncertain, says Kung. Yet we need to maintain a positive fundamental attitude in order to be able to live happily.

This fundamental trust is not cheap optimism. Rather it is an attitude of openness which gives us the confidence to confront reality as it comes, to make sense of that reality in spite of its absurdity and painfulness. It is essentially a trust in yourself, a trust that you can go on even when the going is excruciating and apparently purposeless. It is an acceptance of life as it is with all its insurmountable problems.

Albert Camus concluded his classical essay titled The Myth of Sisyphus with the unforgettable sentence, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Sisyphus spent a lion’s share of his life rolling a stone uphill only to have it pushed down invariably every time by the vengeful gods who had punished him with his stone. Camus says that Sisyphus continued to roll his rock uphill all his life challenging the gods. Sisyphus was saying a resounding Yes to his reality, Camus would say. But Hans Kung says that Camus and his Sisyphus are a kind of nihilists who say No to reality with their rebellion and questioning. No, I go with Camus and Sisyphus. Sisyphus was queerly happy, I believe with Camus. Accepting life as absurd is not nihilism. It is intellectual honesty or at least my personal Yes to reality. Kung has his God to console him. If you have your god with you, it is easy to say Yes to reality. Be happy with your god and your trust in him/her/it. But fundamental trust need not have any divine foundation. I have learnt to say Yes to life and reality without any divine support.

Either way – with or without god – it is important to say Yes to reality if you want to make life as happy as possible.

#BlogchatterA2Z

PS. Tomorrow, with the post titled Zenith, my adventure with the A2Z challenge comes to an end. I’m happy that I have been successful in meeting every deadline without fail. I’m grateful to a whole lot of readers who kept on visiting my blog regularly; they sustained me in the month of April which threw a lot of other challenges in my way. Thank you, readers. I’m grateful to Blogchatter for giving me the challenge.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to