I recently read the book "Serendipity" by Dr Christian Busch. A wonderful read. The author explains the concept of serendipity and the factors responsible for that. Serendipity, as I understood it, means being aware of possibilities that are not apparent in the present frame of mind. For example, when we try to find solutions to poverty, we get fixated on the problem. Poverty is a problem; the only solution lies in providing more and more money and resources to the poor. What if poverty is not a problem rather the problem is the inability to appreciate what we have. Just because the entire society is fixated on money, we feel that poverty is a big problem. What would we prefer: being rich and having a chronic health problem; or being poor and healthy? What if richness is a problem? Or what if the problem is not being poor or rich and rather the problem is the inability to appreciate what we have? If we have 10 times the money we have today and do not appreciate that we have so much, we would be worse off and remain stressed and anxious. Why is depression so prevalent among the riches and powerful?
Quite often we get fixed on a frame of mind that divides the world into good and bad, desirable and undesirable. Whenever we face undesirable situations or do not get what we desire, we consider that a problem. Since we get fixated on a frame of mind, our solutions also get fixated. My child is not doing good at studies is a general problem for many parents. It is because our mind has been fixated on a frame where a child can live a happy life only if he gets money and the only way to earn money in our mind is to get admission to a good college and get a good placement. Experience tells the contrary. The best scientists in the world did not do so well at school. Many industrialists and innovators did not go to school at all. I am not at all making a claim that education has no role in our lives, rather I am saying that we can not judge our kids to be worthless if they have less interest in schools. There may be hundreds of reasons for the same. Maybe, we have put so much pressure on them that they have lost interest, or they have found something more interesting in life, or the school has failed to ignite their minds due to either the boring textbooks, poor pedagogy, bad behavior of the teachers, or bullying by the colleagues.
Mostly we remain confined to our limited frame throughout our lives. The root cause of the problem lies in limited understanding of our lives. The insecure, insensitive, and aggressive society does not give much scope to the kids to look at life afresh. Society is so insecure that it wants to brainwash young kids and suppress all their genuine inquiries. All the kids have so many questions about the rituals, cultures, and religion. Since the parents are themselves quite confused and have been following all these blindly, they are not able to answer these questions. They try to hide their incapacity and ignorance behind the veil of traditions. God becomes someone to be afraid of rather than a friend, philosopher, and guide.
That is the reason why we altogether miss upon the larger purpose of life. Since we have been unable to get answers on the larger purpose of life since our childhood, somehow, our vision of life gets confined to a frame. The frame our society has been fixated on. When we miss the largest purpose of life, and get fixated on a frame, stress, and depression are the natural outcomes. First of all, we miss the innumerable possibilities to explore our lives and then whenever life surprises us with certain events that do not fit into the fixed frame of our lives, we become panicky.
I feel that as parents, our biggest role is to help our kids observe life as it is and help them make a three-layer framework of life. The larger purpose of life sits at the top of the hierarchy. The larger purpose of life is to explore the infinite possibilities that exist in all situations be it the Nazi concentration camp where people like Victor Frankl found possibilities of developing a new technique called Logotheraly, or the prison in which Sri Aurobindo found a possibility of guiding the entire humanity. Then there has to be one or more middle-level purposes that support the larger purpose of life. Such as getting an education from a good college so that the possibilities in a particular subject may be explored, working in an organization so that we may explore the possibilities in the field where such organization is working, or setting up some entrepreneurship to explore the possibilities in a particular field. At the bottom, there has to be some purpose for the day. The bottom level of purpose has to derive its existence from the top level. Then we live serendipitously. We are always open to the possibilities. If that top level of the framework of life is missing, we get caught in a frame and not able to look at the largest picture and therefore become vulnerable to all types of psychological disorders and live life at a very low plane. A proper framework of life allows us to always be open to new possibilities in life.
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