The lightness of being in a challenging world

 Hey, are you feeling the heat of situations and challenges? Just wait. Just look around and try to find out who isn’t.

That’s how life is. That is the nature of life on Earth. It cannot be otherwise.

There will be challenges.

It is just as you cannot move on the ground without friction. Even contradictory forces, like centripetal and centrifugal forces, opposing each other, maintain the orbits of planetary bodies. There is the law of gravitation, and if you look deeply into things, you will find that inherently there is some tussle going on at each stage of life. There is no smooth sailing as such.

Basically, it is about putting up an effort at each stage.

It is not just about the survival of the fittest. That would be generalizing it too much. But overall, it is about facing one challenge after another, and there is hardly any smooth sailing. If at all there is any, those are just a few resting periods.

So I would say the journey on the road is full of challenges, and we have to just keep going.

This mere acceptance is going to put a lot many things in order. The more we are aware of this fact throughout the day, all the time, the less heartburn we will have on account of our own hard situations. Because all of us are sailing in the same boat. All of us are putting up an effort. All of us are trying to save ourselves from the disorder and chaos that seem so imminent.

The only difference is that our challenges are of different natures. That’s it.

Somebody is struggling in one domain of life; someone else is struggling somewhere else. But struggle it is. That is the nature of life.

There will be hardships. There will be ailments. There will be competition. There will be heartbreaks. There will be scores of things that give us pain and bring tears to our eyes.

But if that is the nature of life on Earth, do we have any other option?

We have become used to crossing the hurdles, so that comes almost naturally to most of us. And it will become still smoother and easier if we just always remember that it is simply the way things are here on Earth—the way they were for people in the past, in earlier generations, and the way they will be for the people who will come on Earth after us.

Simply, in this particular little unit, in this particular little celestial unit defined by the environment where this type of life has come to thrive, where energy has manifested in the ways we see it, this is as per the fundamental laws of manifestation, given all the natural factors that have given birth to life on Earth.

So we have to accept challenge as one more natural factor. It is almost inevitable. It is almost impossible to spend an unchallenged life on Earth. That seems impossible.

If we accept this fact, life becomes smoother.

If we accept that there will be challenges, that there will be testing phases, and if we accept this as simply as we accept the laws of nature—as simply as we accept that there is a new dawn after the night and a night following the day—life will become smoother. Hardships and challenges will lose the scary shape they have for most of us.

Because once we accept something as a law of nature, it loses its capacity to demotivate us, to hijack our morale and stall our progress.

So just keep going.

And remember: just look around in the crowd and see. Believe me, there will be scores of people around you who are going through a much, much harder phase than the one you have been facing in your life.

The moment you open yourself to the possibility of others also facing challenges and hardships, acceptance comes very naturally. In fact, if you do a deeper search, you may find that you are lucky in comparison to many other people. Inevitably, you will find that there are so many who have suffered far more than you, without any apparent cause.

To be alive here means to deny the forces of entropy, to deny disorder and chaos, to maintain your identity, to maintain your shape and structure, to maintain your hope, and to continue with your set parameters of life defined by your family, career, ambitions, dreams and skills.

That is what I consider to be among the basic tools of leading at least a purposeful life.

And the day we realize this, the day we feel that challenges and hardships are routine things, we will develop the capacity to enjoy life in those little interludes when we aren’t facing too much testing.

They will become sabbaticals, in fact.

Almost holidays.

And we should not wait for big events to celebrate.

In fact, that would be a folly—to postpone joy, happiness and celebration for occasions when we presume that, after much hard work, we will finally reach there.

Because success, as we have defined it here on Earth, will have very few people reaching the top. If there is one winner, that comes at the cost of hundreds of others who also ran in the same competition but somehow lost.

So we should never, ever commit this mistake of postponing our celebration, joy and relaxation until a point when we think that we will emerge victorious, complete something very, very important, or achieve something very grand in nature.

No.

It is also the nature of life here, and of the kind of competitive structure that we have built up, that inevitably there will be so few winners and so many losers.

Now, the so-called losers can have their own version of success, their own versions of enjoyment, joy and happiness.

Why just be bogged down by the conditions set by business models developed in a capitalist economy, rewarding the excellence of a few at the cost of so many others? Why just get cast in that mould?

It is for you to decide what your success is.

Start trying to look at the success of your life in terms of little, little achievements, little, little accomplishments, small, small acts that we perform on a daily basis.

Do an act of kindness—a little one.

You already are a winner.

Enjoy nature with your full feeling.

You are a winner.

Write a few lines in your journal from the depth of your heart, manifesting so many things in your subconscious.

You are a winner.

Bring tears of gratitude to somebody’s eyes with your act of kindness.

You are a winner.

Bring a little smile to the faces of your children.

You are a winner.

And these small, small milestones on the highway of your life are the grand milestones of your journey.

Celebrate them. Cherish them.

They are the check dams on the stream of challenging life. These are the little check dams that allow you to take some time out from the routine grinding, from regular testing and challenges.

Never miss them.

Because in the hope of reaching some grand homecoming, we miss the little milestones that are always there on both sides of our path. We very rarely look at them.

Look at a little flower by the side of your path.

Look at the honeybees hovering over it.

Look at the trees welcoming you with their swaying branches.

Look at the cool spring air caressing your skin like a lover.

Look at the beautiful azure-blue sky looking at you like a mother with love.

Everything is there for you.

It is just that you have to open yourself to it.

There is beauty despite all the challenges. We just need to be open to it, acknowledge it, and always remain very aware of it.

Life then acquires a definite shape, a tolerable reality.

You get an ease—a lightness of being, I would call it.

So, happy be your journey.

My best wishes.