Give and be happy
By Chitleen K. Sethi

LIFE is lived in moments, happy and sad, loud and quite, remembered and forgotten, something like the dew drops which are there and yet not forever. A thousand emotions, and a single moment can capture them all. Endless love stories, but hatred lives on; countless money, yet poverty stays; happiness abounds, yet suffering remains. These are some of the images of the crises that the human mind finds itself in, and life is just one of them.

Life I guess is something very few people have come to terms with. Most of us live life struggling with its strangeness, its unruly tendency to ruffle the tedious plans we have made for ourselves and our dear ones. Going through the daily grime, grappling with truth, in a mirror image of dreams and desires, we all are pawns in a game, victims of shame, living in a world without being heard.

But does any of this make any sense to the largeness of the life situation we are in? Come to think of it, we are just a microcosm in this ocean of time, a tiny speck in the vastness of space around us. This is humbling, but how many of us realise the implications of the fact that we are basically of significance to no one other than those who know us and whom we know? And in such situations one increasingly realises that things are not that simple. All around us are persons who are anguished mentally and going berserk for the sake of one desire or the other. They want something and get something else and to make things worse someone else gets what they want. It is in these situations when life seems so unliveable but then God is always there to be blamed.

So where is all this getting to? Why am I rubbing it in ? Yes, life can be a trash can but then all is not lost and things are not always that bad. Somethings happen which brings us closer to happiness and we postpone the idea of killing ourselves. There are always people who are worse off than us in all possible ways and we look at them and it puts the verve back in our life and we want to live.

Happiness, joy, love, hatred can come easy. These all are around us and we just have to pick them up. Rustlings of the leaves, snow-capped mountains, a thousand flowers, a mother’s tender touch and the softness of the new born moves us. A single rose can make one fall in love, a single word can hurt. But where is the peace? That elusive flighty satisfying feeling which is here today and gone tomorrow. Some look for it in nature, others in love, some in ambition, others in struggle and some even in hatred but there it lies, deep within the folds of that painful sensitivity which hurts but remains ignored, and which by now we have developed the knack of being indifferent to.

Mother Teresa made the pain of millions her own and her life had the enormity of love to give, to share. To look upon her as a bulwark of social service would be undermining her contribution seriously. She with her arms open, welcomed every tear, every distress, every anguish that came her way. Imagine the pain she would have gathered and the love she would’ve have given in return. One rare human being who had found the solution and had come to terms with life.

The vastness of her soul seems limitless. A mother Teresa lives in most of us but we kill her, everyday a thousand times. We see the pain all around us. In someone’s hungry stomach, in someone’s shivering on the roadside on a cold night in someone’s ,dead delusioned mind, in a blind’s blank stare, in someone’s painful illness, in someone’s physical incompleteness and in the lonely child’s need. Do we do anything about it? No, not for them but for the sickening wrench of our innards with pain and helplessness. Take a few deep breaths and it goes away, the image remains and disturbs but then there are so many other much more important things to remember (like which of our utensils are with the neighbours and the boss’s son’s birthday) that, that, too, is soon forgotten.

Love me- love you, hate me-hate you. Why cant we get out of these cliches and look at the world in totality, beyond our own selves, beyond the image others have of us? Open your heart and arms to those who are not as fortunate as you. Love, the most tender of emotions, can create and kill, yes, but it can heal too. It can generate happiness within those who need it the most. A caring touch, a loving smile, a listening ear, a shared silence is all they want. The old, the mentally impaired, the physically handicapped, the destitute children. Those of us who feel the strongest that life has wronged us, that we have lived in pain, need to remember that we have survived it, we have seen the darkest face of life but right behind it to discover was the purest form of joy.

To feel the pain of others and to make their anguish your own, even for a brief while, brings peace and the calmness of mind many of us have paid thousands to attain. A heightened sensitivity is not something to be self pitied but expressed positively and if channelled can become one’s greatest asset. You feel what the others cant, you see what others overlook, you hear what others are deaf to, you are then what others are not, an enriched perosn a resolved human. Life suddenly seems to have a meaning and your pain your greatest resource.