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

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...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
6 comments
Read more