Joie de Vivre

Experiencing life is ultimately experiencing joy. There are instances of such great intensity and passion that one is lost in the experience itself but there are also everyday mundane activities that provide stability and predictability: Neither of them is joy. Joy is the result of understanding the ephemeral nature of activities, the cyclical nature of history, the relentless murmur of the mind and still continuing on the path laid out for one. The understanding of continuing to persevere in the face of sorrow or great calamity without internal turmoil can only manifest through a sincere, genuine and natural reflection. Why be serious in life? When nothing is really set in stone, anything can happen at any time and for such an unpredictable concoction, why worry at all? Even if someone is a believer in fate; things will pan out the way they are supposed to, how can fretting about it help? Such is the working of nature and we need constant reminders to not get too lost in the games we play with ourselves and with others. 

Watching a sunrise is joy, climbing a mountain is joy, playing with a dog is joy, spending quality time with friends and partners is joy, laughing till your face hurts is joy! Pleasure is only a physical and psychological sensation that feels good, joy is a spiritual sensation that satiates our humanness. Like  emotions and mood, joy is contagious. The 'good and positive vibes', 'calming presence', 'wholesome aura' are all synonyms that refer to the joy that a person or a being radiates. When you come in contact with it, someone deprived of joy is really attracted towards it and moves for it. Being in the presence of someone living with joy and experiencing that joy is not some hocus-pocus, spiritual jumble but a very real experience. It's like the sun, always shining irrespective of the time, day and location. It is the energy that is available for everyone to seek which sustains us spiritually. 

I know of a few people, very dear to me whom I respect with all my heart and spirit. They have been through a great amount of tragedy and have come face to face with trauma at a very young age yet they are the ones for which 'Joie de Vivre' is the motto. Anyone who comes in contact with this joy is left touched and feels the overflowing joy. You cannot but smile and listen to the internal music. Maintaining that joy and passing on the torch of kindness to everybody around is what we want to progress towards. Kahlil Gibran said that "people who aren't good are not evil; they just aren't good". No one is without joy or underserving of our love and touch, it's just that circumstances have been built around them in such a way that they are unable to see this part that is ever present, like clouds over the sun. A warm greeting to a fellow acquaintance, patiently hearing and validating a friend, asking how someone is doing, not taking someone's insult to heart are all manifestations of this joy. Smiling outside and inside is Joy.

The Sound of Silence

In a 10 day Vipassana course; one of the important vows is that of silence. You are asked to observe complete silence over the course of the retreat, hence communication with any other person there is a strict 'No'. When there is no outward expression of our thoughts through words, you tend to realize that you see them more clearly than you usually do while during expression. Before attending the camp I was unfazed by this vow the least as I knew that I could cope with not speaking far better than others but around day 4 or day 5 my mind was seeking an expression in words and when it did not find so, the images surrounding my thoughts became more vivid. Silence for me is then the removal of distractions so that the other activities or the background processes that are always running are more visible to the user. These background processes might contain answers to why the software glitches or what is wrong within the system. Gandhi was a staunch believer in the transformative power of silence and so every Monday, he took a vow of silence and maintained it without fail despite the circumstances. He believed that any kind of restraint is good. Not putting words to your thoughts is also a form of restraint as you see how easily influenced you are by the thoughts that possess us all the time. They seek expression in words, behavior, interpretations, attitudes etc. but not providing them that expression puts them in the limelight of our attention. By thoughts, I do not mean the necessary, instinctually built in thoughts that help us survive and prosper but those that bog us down, breed competition and reduces self esteem and degrades experience. There are all kinds of thoughts that we have but it is in our control to choose the ones on which we act and that is why the idea of having no free will is doubted. There is a movie called The Sound of Silence which is about how an hearing impaired child deals with insurmountable troubled conditions. Unable to speak, the boy founds solace with a monk who teaches him introspection and Buddhist meditation. The boy's gentle nature is constantly challenged by his abusive father who blames him for her mother's death at childbirth. The father is an alcoholic who is emotionally cold and distant and has great contempt for his own child. To witness such depravity is overwhelming and I cried a river while watching this movie. Now, here is a child who has gone through considerable trauma, with no friends and social support, not enrolled in a school and has no outlet for all the mess he has around him. Yet he is sweet, kind and lovable. He has no way to express what he's going through neither he can connect to anyone and yet he prospers in the end. Silence is sound but of inverted frequencies, one which you can only listen with your heart. We are so wary of it that we have created a term called 'Awkward Silence' and with the explosion of earphones, you can always see people wearing those two wires in their ears while going on about their job. The opposite of what should be done is being carried out and enjoyed- constant stimulation. Silence also holds power, great leaders and thinkers were terse and laconic. Stoics considered it to be a virtue. True connection between beings is not created through sound but through silence. When in silence, you can exist naturally and whole heartedly with another person, know that the relationship is consummate or on the right track. Our culture offered us a chance to listen to the sound of silence but the message has got lost in transmission and what's left is some watered down techniques of maintaining silence through meditation. What does this mean? Should we throw away the ear pods and the Bluetooth speakers that we bought with much delight, of course No! but it does mean that incorporating silence in our everyday life in any form can only help us listen to sounds that are not attuned to our ears.

Introduction

 "Death's gotta be easy coz life is hard" - one of the lines sung by one of my favorite rapper Curtis Jackson a.k.a. 50 cents. What intrigued me most from the very start were the questions pertaining to life & death, easy & hard. There exists an apparent dichotomy in almost every thing we understand and arbitrary classifications seem to guide our perceptions and eventually our behavior. However the question remains, Is life really hard? 'What is life' is then the most obvious question that stands out if we continue on this mode of thinking. Is it the internal life that is built of our private thoughts, personal memories and individual narrative or the outer life which is physical but unpredictable and shared by other people and organisms. Which life did the buddha allude to when he said that 'Life is Suffering' and herein the problem of language arises. We do not agree on the color of the tie which goes with a blue shirt, agreeing on the meaning of words is far detached from this especially the context in which words are expressed are out of reach. What do we do then? Should we use analogy as a reasoning tool to expand on what we mean or do we use art to provide support and evidence to our arguments? Why should we even communicate when we know it might be a futile endeavor as what can one possibly gain even if someone truly understands our construal of life and the challenges, experiences and the joys that come with it? Yet, almost all of human history is about passing on that wisdom that one lives  and sees to one's kin and to the masses in some cases. There is this implicit psychological security when we can meet someone in a place where there is complete understanding between the two. Who should we listen to then? In a world of information overload, there are one too many blogs, YouTube channels, twitter threads- everyone giving their two cents on what life is and how should one live it! Numerous lists lists like '5 habits that will change your life', '10 habits of highly effective people', '3 Keys to happiness' dominate the social media sphere and there are some religious followers for each such proposition claiming to benefit from it. They all hope that something might trigger or something might change in them which will open a door within themselves for some 'magic' to happen. You never know what thing could bring someone out of severe depression or someone going through a period of mourning. You just don't know and so in that hope that something might help someone at some godforsaken point of time is why people continue to shell out their life advises, guides, sermons etc. Welcome to simple shit! A blog about life, with life and for life. This is not a guide but a reflection on some idiosyncrasies, imperfections, and illusions of life. Something we all go through, every now and then and what makes us similar to everyone around us and binds us together for eternity. I have no authority neither expertise to write on 'life' but I do have some level of awareness which all of us possess. I'm neither an existentialist nor a stoic. Neither a rationalist nor an idealist. I am but life itself.