I was further contemplating why some people face more turbulence, as compared to others. Just a chain of thoughts from the previous post "Turbulence in Life":
https://observationwithawareness.blogspot.com/2025/12/turbulence-in-life.html
I was watching a video of Nick Vujicic, who was born with no legs and no hands and is today a well-known motivational speaker. Someone who could have very easily turned into a person fully dependent on others for care is taking care of so many people. Someone who could have easily felt deprived of love can spread love to so many people.
https://youtu.be/6F8zK57Wa0A?si=Nof2dQARiDrRrViR
On the other hand, we see so many able-bodied people around us who just keep complaining. Keep making complaints all day long. Keep making you realise that you have not done anything for them. Keep playing victims. As if something very bad has happened to them, as if the whole of the universe is conspiring against them. You can listen to them the whole day and the whole night, but their complaints will not finish. What makes people like Nick Vujicic fight all the challenges in life and create possibilities, and what makes able-bodied people so helpless and full of miseries.
It is the way we understand life. The weather will keep changing. That does not mean that we will give up in rough weather. Nick Vujicic is not going to get his limbs ever. He created possibilities for himself. All of us can create possibilities for ourselves even in the roughest weather. Quite often, the weather is also a creation of our own minds. We get quite attached to some pleasure we have experienced in past or anticipate in future. We make several mental stories around the same time. The anticipated fun of going on a pleasure trip fills our minds with so many stories that any news of the trip getting cancelled becomes intolerable. The pleasures of married life, social validation, having kids, and the comforts and securities of family fill our brains with so many dependencies that it becomes quite difficult for us to think of the possibility of being away from the family.
Our brain is a story-making machine. We live in stories. Every experience is a story. We had so much fun the last time we met. That last party in a friend's home was wonderful. Life is amazing with an understanding wife or husband. Money makes life fun. I will be very happy when so many people recognise my contribution to society. Life is meaningful when we work for others. We need to accumulate good karma for the next birth, even at the cost of suffering in this life. What will society think if I do this? I owe responsibility towards my family. I love my family. These stories look familiar?
Our mind is always full of one or many of these stories. These stories keep playing in our minds, some in the background, while some on the stage. Because we never examine the keywords. There are two key words in all these stories. Pain and pleasure. We feel pained when we do not get what gives us pleasure or joy. But do we ever examine that all stories around pleasure are always very hazy? Do we recall what exactly happened the last time we had fun at a party? No. There would be an experience or sensation, maybe due to tasty food, or some words of appreciation, or some comfort, and then our brain will weave thousands of stories around that experience, and it will be impossible for the brain, at a later stage, to distinguish the reality from the stories it has cooked up. Then the desire to have that pleasurable experience again will keep troubling us. We will be pained if we are not able to plan an event we desire to organise. We will work like donkeys to earn money so that we may organise that event.
We will never be able to realise the stories around our relations, and any anticipated danger to our relationship will look very threatening. We associate so many pleasures with that relationship. Those happy moments. Those sensations we enjoyed, and more than that, thousands of stories we have formed around the relationship. That's why break-offs are so painful. It is not about a person going away; it is about the shattering of so many mental stories that we have made for the future with that person. But how can the same mind that is busy cooking these stories ever experience reality? It is only when we take a break from that story-making machine. We came out of the movie hall to see that it was just a movie. Not easy because the movie is so captivating. Yes, that is. It is one of the most amazingly captivating movie theatres. Our own brain. We have no option but to stay away from that theatre. We can't rip apart the brain and throw that away. But we can learn to watch a movie with the realisation that it's just a movie. That alters our movie-watching experience significantly. We no longer cry or burst with laughter. We see the movie as a wonderful piece of art and appreciate the director, the actors, and the story-writer for their wonderful contribution. We don't get emotionally triggered because we realise that the hero on the screen is different from "us" and that makes life very different. We can now appreciate the role of even the villains. Now, we really watch the movie, every minute detail, and that makes life an amazing experience. Not 2D, 3D or 4D, but an experience with endless dimensions.
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