Some Hard Truths
Some hard truths in search of a clear and uncluttered mind, and possibly happiness
Most times when you see things that you disagree with, you probably choose to stay silent because as the wise say: everybody has a right to opine.
But there are times when you realise something is going amiss if more and more people are saying the same strange things that someone else had said a few decades or centuries ago, and have since been disproved or made redundant.
So before sanity makes me choose silence, here are some actual hard-hitting life rules most of us should realise, comprehend and accept a bit more than we do right now.
1. You will be forgotten
Everything you are doing, all your likes, dislikes, strongest emotions will not be remembered in a hundred or even less years.
Reality check: do you know your great-grandparents' names. There were eight of them. If you don't remember them, think your great-grandchildren will remember you?
If you are lucky, a picture of you will adorn a wall or a screen or two. But not for long. Soon, those who have hung your pictures will join you in afterlife and all of us will be forgotten.
The world will carry on. Different maybe but not quite.
The thing is, this is a blessing. But we have made it into something unworthy. Time perhaps for a rethink.
2. What you feel as 100% certain is likely not
Certainty is mostly a myth.
In case you did not know, even the certainty of mathematics is based on assumptions. Take those assumptions away and you and someone smarter than me will arrive at different answers to the same questions.
We base our emotions on what we see and hear and construe them based on our experiences and memories. Sometimes shared experiences make certain emotions seem universal but they are not. They are just you and me and a few others growing up in a specific environment with certain commonalities. Take the environment and commonalities away and we are very different from each other.
Yes, we will seek connections but those will be again influenced heavily by our past experiences, our emotions and our need to connect. Whether the connections are based on truth or not is a different matter, which we will choose to ignore for the sake of new-found and much-needed comradeship, and a sense of certainty.
3. Your ideas and your interpretations are just that – ideas and interpretations
They are coloured by you, your experiences, your ideas and your vehemence of what is right.
Someone else will interpret things differently. If you are a leader, someone will definitely interpret you differently. Your words will be twisted to trap innocents.
What you feel and say do not matter in the larger scheme of things. They attain strength based on your connections and your offline and digital reach, nothing much beyond that. Sometimes you reach into the foreseeable future but mostly not as your words fade away before you.
Your words may make you a prophet but even then your religion will not matter. It will fade - in a millennia or ten.
Don't let practicality and sensibility challenge you either. Both are interpretations. Just strengthened beyond measure by social acceptability.
Know this to see how boundaries and expectations are created by people around you. Each is lost in a world of interpretations and expectations. You reacting differently will create a ripple and the effects can be quite quixotic. But don't watch them too much or you will get lost in the very thing from which you want to escape.
Understanding this is a blessing, if we are able to accept it. But not realising it – let alone understanding or accepting it – is a good reason why were are in such a mess most of the time.
So, when you say things that are important, base them on equity, equanimity, kindness and honesty. If you are lucky, your words will help someone. If not, you will have given your best devoid of affectations and that is a good way to live.
4. Nature does not care about your rules. Or mine or someone else's
We create rules and boxes because we like order and definitions but everything we have created are based on our interpretations.
Liberal or conservative? Capitalism or socialism? Right or left? Religious or atheist? Science or art? Hard work or smart work? Teamwork or lone wolf? Righteous or irascible?
These are simply convenient boxes we have created to make sense of the world around us. Each is connected with the other in a messy sort of a way – mostly undefinable and non-replicable as yet.
But all these rules, boxes, connections fade away in light of something more universal:
Nature does not care for rules besides its own.
Why?
For nature and its rules are a phase in time. And time does not care. Earth exists for a fraction of a second in the millennia of time. Nature exists for even less. Our rules are nothing. They are mere ideas and interpretations to create our version of sense.
But despite all this…
5. Your views are important
Whether you choose to be a change-maker or a follower, a polymath or someone extremely average, your views matter. As long as you don't hurt someone, you have every right to think, believe, do, say and act however you want.
Think work is worship? You are right. Think, work is drudgery? Right again.
Think getting up at 5 am is the right thing? Right you are. Think 1 pm is better. Right you are too.
No one should say you are wrong. Whatever feedback you get are mere interpretations.
(But will people say you are wrong? Definitely.)
What will you do by being right? Change the world? For how many years and for how many lives? If history has taught us anything, it is that it is maybe better to be gone and forgotten than be remembered for wise words that others make into a religion or a cult.
And if you are smart enough to create leaps of humanity, realise that nothing will happen if you do not. Someone else will make those leaps a few years down the line. Maybe better leaps.
What then?
The fact that you choose to do what you want to do despite knowing they don’t matter in the larger scheme of things – makes the difference.
Choice is the definitive element here. Choose to have your own views – make a few extraordinary if possible
Don’t get too worked up when your ideas and interpretations find no takers or fade away. Entropy is part and parcel of existence. Accepting and choosing to create and live by a few good rules – without forcing others – is a good way to spend your time.
6. You will end up making a lot of mistakes
Anything under your control, you are likely to mess up some bit.
We are not in control of our emotions. We move in sync with our circles of influence. Emotional hijacking is a norm for most of us. So expect yourself to make mistakes but don't spend time defending them or lamenting them.
A good but difficult way forward is to learn from them. Without histrionics.
Don't be a drama queen. Someone definitely would have had it worse than you and survived and probably thrived.
If you have problems, see a doctor or better yet, read a good book. Listen to a guru or a mentor – they don’t need to be alive. Some of the smarter women and men have passed on. And if we are lucky enough, some of their words would have stayed. You will likely not find anything older than 4000 years but sometimes even the newer ones can be gold.
7. How you treat yourself and others are important
We may be forgotten, 100% incorrect all the time, etc. But then how do we live, how do we find a path to tread and reasons to take a step ahead if life is devoid of anything we hold dear?
It is easy if you remember a fundamental truth:
In all of time, in the billions of years that have gone and the trillions more to come, you are unique.
There will be no one like you – ever.
Even if you believe in rebirth – even then. There will be no one like you – in this phase of time. Which makes you unique again.
So, what you do, what you believe in, what you hold dear are important.
No matter how different, no matter how strange, how befuddling they are to others.
But there is one other fact you have to remember: like you, each of the others is unique.
Each has a right to hum their own tune. Follow their own steps.
Do what you want to do and what you think is right – without hurting anyone else.
How you treat yourself and how you treat others are important. It will define you and everything around you. More so than the questionable standards we define for success and failure.
Don't just follow shiny baubles – things or ideas – because they look beautiful. Most are merely clutter that burden you unnecessarily. And their beauty fades in time.
8. Don’t take yourself seriously
Just don’t.
9. The most important thing is the joy of the moment
We become immune to the beauty of the moment due to overabundance of time. So lost between the minutes, hours, days, weeks and years that we forget the second.
To enjoy life and live your fullest – choose to do things that you cherish every second. Yes, you will not always be doing things that you absolutely adore but you can choose to, most of the time.
Slow down. Everything.
Enjoy buttering the bread, kneading the dough, cutting the vegetables, drinking some water, typing a word, cleaning the windows – slow down and relish the mundane.
If you can find joy in the moment, you will find happiness across time.
Forget all talk of gratefulness. It will come naturally as soon as you choose joy in every moment. Else you will be chasing ideas you cannot fathom.
If you work primarily in the mind, find something to do with your hands without engaging the mind. If you work with your hands, do something you enjoy with your mind. You don’t need to stretch it – just enjoy it.
Choose to do the work you love. Slowly and steadily. You will not be always successful in finding flow in a world of deadlines – but if you try, you can slow down sometimes to enjoy the work more.
And that is a good start.
To end:
Choose to do what you love, what makes you smile and what does not make anyone else sad. Do not limit it by the ‘sensible’ rules of life unless you like those rules.
Slow down. Run free. Break some silly rules. Embrace the truth. Speak it wisely. Cherish wins. Own failures. Find your own path. Choose happiness. Choose life.