We pack our bags for a meeting in a different city. We book the tickets and reach the airport. After boarding the flight, we read the papers for the meeting, prepare ourselves mentally, and reach the destination. Nothing extraordinary about this. But do we ever realise that we have been part of one of the biggest miracles on Earth? We were aboard an aircraft that weighed 70-80 tons. That means an object of 70-80 tons flying in the air. But we are lost in our preparation for the meeting and miss the magic.
Isn't it true for almost the whole of our lives? Every moment is full of magic, but somehow, we are so obsessed with our thoughts that we miss the magic. In the morning, we get up when there is little light outside, and soon there is light all around us. If we just stay with it, isn't it amazing that the Earth, which is hanging in space like a ball, keeps rotating on its axis, and every 24 hours we are facing the Sun for a few hours and on the other side of the Earth for a few hours? The "I" looks so small. When we go for a walk, we see so many trees. We have never ever taken any care of them, and yet they are busy producing the oxygen for us, and we feel fresh in their company. We enter the bathroom to get ready and open the tap to fill the bucket with water. We are amazed to think about how water reached our bathroom. Then we get ready and enter the metro or car, and see that so many people are going to the office. So many people, all rushing towards their destination, and yet none knows where one has come from and where one will go after death. Yet, everybody is so driven to reach the destination. In the office, you get targets, and the targets are sacrosanct. While none of us is aware of the mystery of birth and death, it's surprising to see that so many of us are so driven to achieve the targets.
We miss the wonders of flying while aboard an aircraft because our minds are busy with the food, entertainment, or preparation for the meeting. Similarly, we miss the wonders of life because we are busy with thoughts about fear, anxiety, achievements, targets, acquisitions, jealousy, and so on. What is that one thing that decides our experience of life? It is attention. There are three possibilities. First, our attention may be fixated on a very narrow framework, and we may spend the whole of life living in comfort. Second, we may also set a target in the domain of the known, then put a blindfold on our eyes and keep running our whole lives to achieve that target. Third, we may be open to all the possibilities and live life with an open mind that observes every possibility and, in fact, participates actively in different possibilities.
Since childhood, we are told to settle down early. To get a job, marry, have kids, and accumulate wealth, so that we may spend life comfortably. Just think of the life of a person who has all this and does a routine job, and compare him with a person who has none of these but explores the field of science passionately, or goes to space and walks in space fearlessly, or paints on the canvas his thoughts and imaginations without any boundaries, or writes something that comes from deep within. I don't know whether a mind which is so obsessed with "settling down" can ever imagine or conceive this, but I am sure that if you offer such a settled life to that scientist, astronaut, artist, or writer, he will never choose it. Somebody who has experienced an ocean is never going to settle down in the well.
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