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

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...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

Are You Sane?

Illustration by Gemini AI A few months back, a clinical psychiatrist asked me whether anyone in my family ever suffered from insanity. “All of us are insane to some degree,” I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t because there was another family member with me. We had taken a youngster of the family for counselling. I had forgotten the above episode until something happened the other day which led me to write last post . The incident that prompted me to write that post brought down an elder of my family from the pedestal on which I had placed him simply because he is a very devout religious person who prays a lot and moves about in the society like the gentlest soul that ever lived in these not-so-gentle terrains. I also think that the severe flu which descended on me that night was partly a product of my disillusionment. The realisation that one’s religion and devotion that guided one for seven decades hadn’t touched one’s heart even a little bit was a rude shock to me. What does re...

Loving God and Hating People

Illustration by Gemini AI There are too many people, including in my extended family. who love God so much that other people have no place in their hearts. God fills their hearts. They go to church or other similar places every day and meet their God. I guess they do. But they return home from the place of worship only to pour out the venom in their hearts on those around them. When I’m vexed by such ‘religious’ people I consult Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov in which there are some characters who are acutely vexed by spiritual questions. Let me leave Ivan Karamazov to himself, as he has been discussed too much already. In Book II, Chapter 4 [ A lady of Little Faith ], a troubled woman comes to Father Zosima, the wise monk, and confesses her spiritual struggle. “I long to love God,” she says. She knows that she cannot love God without loving her fellow human beings, or at least doing some service to them. The truth is, she says, “I cannot bear people. The closer they ...