It is quite surprising to see that so many of us have a huge potential to grow and yet end up living a routine life. 9 to 6 office, looking forward to the weekends the entire week and then spending weekends over some socialization, day trips, taking rest, and watching movies. That's how our entire life is spent after getting the job. The only growth we experience after getting the job is the growth of bank balance, which hardly carries any meaning. Even more surprising is the fact that the most talented people in this country who pass out from the best of the colleges, IITs, IIMs, and clear civil services, end up living such a routine life.
What else can be done? Aren't we supposed to earn and take care of the families? What is wrong with that? There would be many such questions like that. I would like to answer these questions by asking a counter-question. What makes us resist change while we look forward to exploring every new thing and every new experience as a child? We need to examine why this happens and what the consequences of this attitude are.
Are we taking the easy way out? What made Columbus start his journey to explore an unknown world while all his colleagues in Europe were happy believing that the world was limited to Europe? What made Newton curious about the falling of an apple while so many of us would have seen so many apples falling without ever asking the reason? What made Buddha so interested in enquiring the truth while all his countrymen were happy living their routine lives? Probably, the easy way out is the default option. Keep lying on the bed is the default option unless we make up our minds to get out of bed. We don't need to make efforts if we want an apple, lying on the table, to continue in the same position. However, if we want it to throw the apple up, we have to make an effort. This is the law of inertia. Routines also have their own inertia. Once trapped in the routine, we generally give up on curiosity and end up living a routine life.
It's like an electron trapped in an orbit. It needs escape velocity to change the orbit. Similarly, once we get trapped in a routine, we need a certain escape velocity to change the same. Most people are happy being trapped in the routine until there is some crisis. When there is a crisis like a health crisis, relationship crisis, or financial crisis, they look forward to quick solutions. Reluctant to change, they want to keep orbiting in the same orbit and keep looking for the babas, astrologers, and psychologists for the solutions. Some try to find an escape in alternative careers and alternative relationships, failing to realize that the crisis is there to provide us the escape velocity to move out of orbit.
We all keep facing different crises in our relationships and careers. When Tulsidas was insulted by his wife, he became a saint because he took this as an opportunity to come out of the routine and the insult provided him an escape velocity to not only shift to a higher orbit but to leave the field of attraction towards this world. However, most of us are reluctant to learn from the crisis and try to find solutions that help us stick to the orbit. Probably due to the pleasure we get from the routine. It's difficult to decide to study harder when we fail in the civil services examination, and the easy way out is to curse the UPSC and circumstances. It is easy to blame the partner in a relationship when something goes wrong rather than taking the responsibility to mature and help the partner to mature in a relationship.
Somehow I feel that a disconnected soul is so deprived of the inner joy that it negotiates its growth for cheap pleasure. It's like somebody who has never watched a classic movie, spending hours to get some fun with short YouTube videos. Like somebody who has never tasted the food prepared with love by his mother, trying to search for that taste in different restaurants. It's like somebody deprived of true friendship looking for that sharing with Facebook friends. It is like somebody seeking contentment in likes on social media. That inner disconnect makes us shallow and shallowness has no limit of insecurity. In a state of inner disconnection, we are so shallow that we try to quench our thirst for joy by making shallow friends, taking alcohol, participating in social events, using social media to get some likes, and using even our work as an escape mechanism. The more we try to seek happiness in all these things and more empty we feel. It is because we are seeking love, and we are reluctant to admit that we lack love. If we place an order for pleasure, the delivery boy is not going to bring love. In fact, for love, we need not place any order and just need to drop the pretensions and be our true selves. When we connect to nature and fellow human beings, having dropped the mental stories, inauthenticities, beliefs, and pretensions, we feel complete, and with that feeling of being complete, we no longer seek anything else but love everything and everybody, having understood that all of them are manifestations of the same divine, and want to share that feeling with everybody around.
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