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. Bookish delight and joyJanuary 7, 2019 at 10:09 AM

    Wonderful post

    ReplyDelete
  2. suhavijayJanuary 7, 2019 at 10:14 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 7, 2019 at 4:04 PM

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

      Delete
  3. Arvind PasseyJanuary 7, 2019 at 10:40 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 7, 2019 at 4:02 PM

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

      Delete
  4. Varsha BaikarJanuary 7, 2019 at 11:41 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sachin BaikarJanuary 7, 2019 at 11:23 PM

    Inspiring post 👍 Thanks for sharing 🙂

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rajeev MoothedathJanuary 8, 2019 at 8:35 AM

    "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. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 8, 2019 at 9:24 AM

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

      Delete
  7. Pranju chakrapaniJanuary 8, 2019 at 9:53 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 8, 2019 at 10:32 AM

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

      Delete
  8. Ankita SinghJanuary 8, 2019 at 2:08 PM

    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
  9. Jyotirmoy SarkarJanuary 8, 2019 at 7:51 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  10. Pebble In The Still WatersJanuary 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  11. Sapna DhyaniJanuary 10, 2019 at 8:11 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 10, 2019 at 8:53 PM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
8 comments
Read more