Skip to main content

Live Life Fully


Alexis Zorba, the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek, lives life to its fullness. He embraces human experience with his whole heart. He is not interested in rational explanations and intellectual isms. His philosophy, if you can call it that at all, is earthy, spontaneous and passionate. He loves life passionately. He celebrates it. Happiness is a simple affair for him. “I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing happiness is,” he tells us. “A glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.” You don’t need a lot of things to be happy. Your possessions don’t bring you happiness. All that money you spent on your big house, big car, big everything… It helps to show off. But happiness? No way, happiness doesn’t come that way at all.

Zorba loves to play his musical instrument, santouri. He loves to sing. To dance. But don’t get me wrong. He works too. He works hard. There’s no fullness of life without that hard work. “This is true happiness,” he will tell you, “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.”

A fairy tale. Can you make your life a fairy tale?

The fullness of life lies in your ability to make your life a fairy tale with its magic and miracles.

Miracle is nothing but a change of attitude.

Give up some of that gargantuan ego. Chisel off the jutting cerebration. Come down to the earth and live there. Feeling it with your feet. Touching it with your heart. You know too much. You think too much. That’s why you won’t be happy. Happiness is an emotion. Experience it in your neurons. Experience it in the breeze that wafts from across your horizons.

Zorba is passionate and exuberant. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know the tragedies of human existence. Suffering, loss and death are all inevitable parts of life. Accept it. And go on. With a smile on your lips and a dance in your heart.

Don’t complicate life with religion, Zorba will tell you. If you bring God in, the devil is sure to follow. There will be a mess soon. What you need is a bond with the universe. That is the real religion. Have you ever experienced a mystical connection with life itself, beyond the dogma of your creed and scriptures and rituals? If not, you can give up your religion safely: it has done you no good. Try Zorba’s religion. Learn to sing a song. To dance to a tune. Or at least to enjoy the breeze on your face.

Life is absurd. It doesn’t fit in neat philosophical theories.  Not in charming theologies. Or soothing prayers, formulaic rituals, ardent pilgrimages. Life is a mystery to a large extent, Zorba will tell you. Can you embrace that mystery? Without needing answers? If you can, you will unfold the wings of your personal freedom, your very authenticity… and you will spread your wings… and FLY.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon

Previous Posts in this series:

1. Heights of Evil

2. Pip Learns the Essential Lessons

3. Delusions and Ironies of Love

4. Good Old Days without meetings

5. Finding Enlightenment

6. An Oracle Gives up his Goddess

7. The Ruler Matters

8. The Agony of Ivan Karamazov

The series will end with one more post.

 

Comments

  1. Pradeep NairSeptember 8, 2024 at 10:19 AM

    Life is not to be dissected or rationalized, but to be lived with passion, spontaneity, and a connection to the world around us! True happiness lies in the simple joys is it not? Good food, music, hard work, and may be occasional surprises in life! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chandra SundeepSeptember 8, 2024 at 10:53 AM

    What you need is a bond with the universe. That is the real religion! Such a simple idea, and yet, we make life complicated.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 8, 2024 at 12:04 PM

      We make life complicated because of our own vulnerabilities. I'll conclude this series with the vulnerability of Alfred Prufrock and the alien wisdom of Little Prince. 👍

      Delete
  3. Yamini MacLeanSeptember 8, 2024 at 1:20 PM

    Hari Om
    Zorba captivated my younger self and was one of the inspirations for my own search for the simple. I've been told so many times that I've not lived to my full potential... And I say I have lived it as intended: day by day, roll and sway, bringing the tale my way! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 8, 2024 at 1:29 PM

      I've got that impression about you, Yam. That you're a person who's found fulfilment in life.

      Delete
  4. Liz A.September 9, 2024 at 12:51 AM

    A fine philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sabina PillaiSeptember 9, 2024 at 6:37 PM

    Zorba's enigmatic and persona is full of insights for the reader.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 9, 2024 at 6:47 PM

      Zorba is an embodiment of the wisdom that Kazantzakis acquired in his life.

      Delete
  6. CareenaSeptember 18, 2024 at 10:09 PM

    I love this idea of the bond with Universe being the religion. Yep another fulfilling post. Bookmarked and shared with a few people I think need to read it.

    ReplyDelete

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

Being Christian in BJP’s India

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...
26 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

The wisdom of the Mahabharata

Illustration by Gemini AI “Krishna touches my hand. If you can call it a hand, these pinpricks of light that are newly coalescing into the shape of fingers and palm. At his touch something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below. I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it! I am beyond the name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. And yet, for the first time, I’m truly Panchali. I reach with my other hand for Karna – how surprisingly solid his clasp! Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming and dissolving again like fireflies in a summer evening.” What is quoted above is the final paragraph of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions which I reread in the last few days merely because I had time on my hands and this book hap...
12 comments
Read more

Hollow Leaders

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men . The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.” Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow. “We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside. There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimat...
16 comments
Read more