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.