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

Break Your Barriers

  Guest Post Break Your Barriers : 10 Strategic Career Essentials to Grow in Value by Anu Sunil  A Review by Jose D. Maliekal SDB Anu Sunil’s Break Your Barriers is a refreshing guide for anyone seeking growth in life and work. It blends career strategy, personal philosophy, and practical management insights into a resource that speaks to educators, HR professionals, and leaders across both faith-based and secular settings. Having spent nearly four decades teaching philosophy and shaping human resources in Catholic seminaries, I found the book deeply enriching. Its central message is clear: most limitations are self-imposed, and imagination is the key to breaking through them. As the author reminds us, “The only limit to your success is your imagination.” The book’s strength lies in its transdisciplinary approach. It treats careers not just as jobs but as vocations, rooted in the dignity of labour and human development. Themes such as empathy, self-mastery, ethical le...
3 comments
Read more

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

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
14 comments
Read more

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...
14 comments
Read more

The Irony of Hindutva in Nagaland

“But we hear you take heads up there.” “Oh, yes, we do,” he replied, and seizing a boy by the head, gave us in a quite harmless way an object-lesson how they did it.” The above conversation took place between Mary Mead Clark, an American missionary in British India, and a Naga tribesman, and is quoted in Clark’s book, A Corner in India (1907). Nagaland is a tiny state in the Northeast of India: just twice the size of the Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh. In that little corner of India live people belonging to 16 (if not more) distinct tribes who speak more than 30 dialects. These tribes “defy a common nomenclature,” writes Hokishe Sema, former chief minister of the state, in his book, Emergence of Nagaland . Each tribe is quite unique as far as culture and social setups are concerned. Even in physique and appearance, they vary significantly. The Nagas don’t like the common label given to them by outsiders, according to Sema. Nagaland is only 0.5% of India in area. T...
12 comments
Read more