Coming from city, like Delhi to city like Leh makes you feel humbled. Cities like Delhi offer very little space for individual growth. I am often amused to see the bonsai plants. A plant which had every capacity to grow into a full tree is confined to small pot and its roots are not allowed to grow beyond the size of the pot. The plant becomes a miniature of the actual plant and called bonsai.
Isn’t that what the society is doing to all the individuals, who have got disconnected somehow from their inner self, the ground. Isn’t it so that the disconnected souls are offered a pot filled with certain temptations and comforts by restricting the opportunities of the growth of the individuals. isn’t the society taking away the ground for growth for growth by offering certain comforts and pleasures filled in a pot called family, or society, or organisation. Should the families be the pots that set an outer limit for the growth of the individuals belonging to the family. Or the families should be the initial safe heavens within which the seeds are allowed to grow so long as the pot has sufficient space to offer them, and as soon as the individuals want to grow beyond the size of the pot, the individuals should be free to find their own place in the nature, where they have sufficient place to grow. their roots can go to infinite depths, they don’t need external watering, rather they are powerful enough to extract water from the ground. They don’t need external fertiliser, rather they have sufficient strength to make their own food interacting with the air and the sunlight. For a society, obsessed with the bonsai, it is difficult to even think of a possibility of allowing individuals freedom to grow at their own pace and to their own size.
Nature is raw in mountains. Every creature including the trees, birds and animals have to carve out their own space. There is enough space for everybody but not the comfort. However, this is this struggle that makes the trees, birds and animals as strong and beautiful as they are . The bonsai cannot ever think of becoming a tree on the mountain. It has got so used to comforts and pleasures that it is beyond its imagination to grow into a full tree.
Of course,the bonsai does not need to struggle for the food and water. It looks good to the owner of the house, who intern offers it food and the water. However, it always remains at the mercy of the owner. We have also got used to different comforts and pleasures which are respective organisations offer us. However, they too want us to grow into size and shape that suits those organisations. There is no free space for the growth of the individuals. They offer us pay and perks to make us comfortable like a bonsai.
A seed appears to have no choice or little choice as to whether it will grow into a bonsai or a tree in the forest or mountains. it may appear to many human beings that they too have very limited choice as to whether they will grow into bonsai or in the open forest. We need to examine this question ourselves. Nobody can give answer to this question. However, one of the pointers to help examine this question maybe to examine the role of comforts and pleasures in our life. I have seen people going for explorations like mountains and looking for the same comforts and pleasures that they enjoyed back home. One of the best selling point of a hotel maybe free Wi-Fi. People want to have music, fun, dance, chitchat with with their family members, achievement of having covered most of the tourist spots, place their pictures on the Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and wait for the likes. We are so obsessed with the pleasures and comforts, that we presume to be comforts and pleasures, where is the scope for exploration? How can a person who is so obsessed with comforts and pleasures grow into a free soul? A soul who wants to explore the world in its rawest form? will it ever be able to come out of temptation of comfort and pleasure that organisations, societies and families offer?
We need to introspect as to what is primary to us? Is it the comforts and pleasures inside the pot or freedom to grow? if we choose comforts and pleasures over growth, we have made a choice to be a bonsai, which is a very little fragment of the real possibilities? If we choose growth over the comforts and pleasures, we have immense possibilities to grow. The growth is organic. We cannot define the contours of such growth. While growing in the forest, we grow organically. The growth in such situations depends on so many factors such as the fellow trees, weather, terrain, rainfall, the birds and animals. However, the possibilities are immense. We grow as we learn, and we learn as we grow. That is the beauty of entire process. Here the process itself is quite enjoyable unlike growing as a bonsai where the outcome is to just suit the concept of beauty of the organisation, society, or the family and be happy just to survive and have certain comforts and pleasures, to keep doing 9 to 5 job and keep waiting for the weekends to have little fun and pleasure.
It’s a choice. Every human being has to make. In fact, only human beings have been offered such a choice which is not available to the birds, plants and animals. A bird, plant or animal living in a city may not have the opportunity to shift to the forest. However, the human beings have all possibilities in their hands. That’s why it looks all the more stupid to exercise choices that limit us just to buy certain pleasures and comforts, which too, if analysed with peaceful mind, may be more like a sweet addiction, having it’s own implications on the health, both physical and mental. Our choices not only decide our future, but also have a lot of impact on the choices of our next generations. That is the reason why we need to let go the comforts and pleasures at least for sometime so that we can see the reality and make choices that help us realise our full potential as human beings, not to become a bonsai plant to suit the purpose of an organisation or society or a family, but to grow into tree, which can interact with the light and the air and stand tall on its own without craving for the fertiliser and water offered by the owners who prevent our natural growth to suit their petty purposes.
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