Skip to main content

Zenith



Life is like a trek in the mountains. Every peak entices you. Standing on the zenith, you look at other peaks which beckon you. Conquests, that’s what trekking is about; that’s what life is about.

The joy that a trekker experiences while standing on the zenith of a mountain is quite different from, say, what you experience when you receive a promotion at your office. Real conquests fill the spirit with a new vigour in spite of all the pain you endured on the way. The rugged paths through the mountain slopes, the exhaustion on the way and the rain and the sun that you braved, they don’t matter now. In fact, they metamorphose into a special kind of joy.

As Richard Bach said, when you have conquered certain heights you don’t want to go down; you want to spread your wings and fly. That’s what zeniths do to you. You don’t want to go down; you want to spread your wings and fly.

Zeniths that really enrich life are not about amassing more wealth or attaining higher positions in society. They are about reaching out to the higher levels within your consciousness. They are about expanding your consciousness, deepening it, becoming more and more aware of the mysteries of life, the magic of life. All great people achieved higher levels of consciousness. Greatness is a higher level of consciousness. Higher levels of consciousness give you wings and you fly among the clouds. Wings don’t belong to the earth’s mundaneness.

The real magic of life is rising above the mundane concerns and considerations. There is a milieu that lies beyond those concerns and considerations. It is not difficult to reach that milieu. What is required is the desire to reach there. And a concerted effort to grow wings. Read, contemplate, question and dream. Life’s magic will unfold as smoothly as the rain descends from burdened clouds.

PS. #BlogchatterA2Z
This is the last post in the series. Thank you for having been with me in the last one month. I’m particularly grateful to those who supported my venture with their comments and especially those who sent me WhatsApp messages telling me that my A2Z series helped them see life in a different way. I’m gratified.


Comments

  1. Renu VyasApril 30, 2018 at 7:18 PM

    "The real magic of life is rising above the mundane concerns and considerations"

    I couldn't have described it better than that..strange how we let ourselves get entangled in our day to day petty mundane things and in the process miss out on the larger picture.

    Richard Bach..a fav of mine too (and of course Ayn Rand). ☺️

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2018 at 8:19 PM

      People miss the magic of life because they refuse to rise above the mundaneness.

      I loved both Bach and Rand as a young man. Bach still makes sense to me. Rand is too capitalist, I feel.

      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

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

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

My Experiments with Hindi

M y knowledge of Hindi is remarkably deficient despite my living in the northern parts of India for three whole decades. The language never appealed to me. Rather, my Hindi teachers at school, without exception, were the coarsest people I ever met in that period of my life and they created my aversion to Hindi. Someone told me later that those who took up Hindi as their academic major in Kerala were people who failed to secure admission to any other course. That is, if you’re good for nothing else, then go for Hindi. And so they end up as disgruntled people. We students became the victims of that discontent. I don’t know if this theory is correct, however. Though I studied Hindi as my third language (there was no other option) at school for six years, I couldn’t speak one good sentence in that language when I turned my back on school happily and with immense relief after the tenth grade. Of course, I could manage some simple sentences like में लड़का हू। [I am a boy.] A few line...
8 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