Skip to main content

Live life fully



In one of his poems, Pablo Neruda suggests that if we were not “so single-minded / about keeping our lives moving” we would be a happier lot. We take life too seriously. Take a specimen from our species. Let’s call him Raj. Raj is a ‘focused’ student. He studies all the time. In addition to his school studies is the entrance coaching. Finally he gets admission to one of the best institutions of higher learning. He becomes a professional success eventually. Now he is single-minded about constructing a good house. Then marriage, children and their quality education, promotion in the job, and so on. Raj is a great ‘success’. Is he?

Does Raj ever live his life? He exists. He succeeds by the standards of plebeian perceptions. He may appear to be happy too. He has his occasional holidays with his family, hasn’t he? He goes abroad to enjoy them. He has everything he wants, apparently.

The reality is Raj may not be happy at all. Worse, he may not even be aware of that deep inner discontent. He has no time for such awareness. He is single-minded about keeping his life successful.

As Kazantzakis’s Zorba said, happiness is as simple and frugal as a glass of wine, a roast chestnut and the sound of the sea. Unless we learn to stand in awe before a pansy on the wayside, unless we are able to listen to the music of the wafting breeze, unless we can smile genuinely at the little child on the way, we may be taking life too seriously. And hence we may not be fully human and fully alive.

Zorba is a happy man. His philosophy is: “to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realise of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”

Life is simple. We make it complex and complicated. When we realise the simplicity, we also realise that happiness is all around us all the time available as freely and as naturally as the air we breathe.

PS. Written for In[di]spire Edition 255: #FullyHumanFullyAlive





Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Wonderful narration. Its true that life is simple, if we let it be...but unneccesarily we only complicate it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Often our outlooks are shaped by our society. If we can be a little independent of social pressures, happiness is within reach!

      Delete
  2. A glass of wine and roasted chestnuts are excellent metaphors to represent the 'simple' pleasures of life... but a person like me would need to work his ass off to afford this simplicity. But I do agree with your point of view... loved this post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In case you haven't read Zorba the Greek, i would highly recommend it.

      Delete
  3. Nice post... "Life is simple. We make it complex and complicated" - its true Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Inspiring post 👍 Thanks for sharing 🙂

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Happiness is as simple and frugal as a glass of wine, a roast chestnut and the sound of the sea".
    Yes, happiness is simply the state of the mind. That state could be brought on by different things for different people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, for different people the metaphors of happiness vary but ultimately it's a state of mind which is quite common.

      Delete
  6. As Zorba says, “The idea is everything. You believe, and a sliver from an old door becomes a piece of the True Cross. You don’t believe, and the entire True Cross becomes an old door.”
    The idea is to believe in an idea.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Zorba himself would dismiss the cross as a sliver of wood. Sanctity of life should not be usurped by such idols and totems.

      Delete
  7. I would like to say many thanks to you for the useful information that you provided here.
    To get more info click below...
    https://www.bharattaxi.com/

    ReplyDelete
  8. Very nice take on the prompt Sir, totally agree with the views.

    ReplyDelete
  9. absolutely correct. life is simple in its original form. we make it complex.

    ReplyDelete
  10. To be involved with life ,the near ones and the acquainted....and yet manage a semblance of detachment; is an ideal way of being. This is what I understood from the " Zorba" portion of the article. An inspiring and thought provoking article, Sir

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's worth reading the entire Zorba. You understood that bit so well.

      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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...