There
is much that I thought that I knew about my life that I actually didn’t. About
myself, about people around me, about situations and dynamics past and existing.
About thinking itself. A lot that I thought I had thought about deeply. Several
rude shocks lurked there.
Life
is like a 400 meter run, the track representing a lifetime, say 80 years. The
first 100 meters or 20 years is highly eventful (curved on the track), as we
move from helpless baby to physical, emotional and intellectual maturity as an
independent, full grown, educated adult. The second 100/20 is a mad rush
straight ahead, building family, career, a place in the sun. The third 100/20
is again full of change (curved), when our responsibilities peak and plateau at
home and in the office, we may lose dreams, our body no longer feels
indestructible, and then the established order ends, kids leave home, work
pretty much ends, we retire. That’s when
we enter the last 100/20 and for the first time the tape, the end, comes in
view and the end is death. And being faced with our own death can illuminate life
like nothing else can.
We
have a largish oil painting at home, semi-abstract, which has yielded itself to
me slowly over many years. At times I would sit and stare at it and see it in
yet another way … the movement across the painting of a particular colour, the
interplay of colours, the emergence of form in what seemed formless, and now
the picture is completely different to what I saw at first, it has yielded a
lot.
The
same is true of life. As I reflect on it, I see things I never saw before, even
though they were in plain sight. Even the familiar can become quite different
to what it seemed earlier. My picture of myself has changed radically. My
flaws, which I covered up functionally, which I rationalized defensively in the
rush and tumble of the first 300/60 are now coming into stark, clearly etched,
inescapable sight. We are quick to spot even subtle flaws in others and can
give genuinely good advice, but even the most obvious flaws in ourselves can
remain shrouded forever. The idea is to bring them out of the dark into the
light of reasoned thought.
Flaws
distort our view of reality, cause us to live a life of partial lies, correction
is an imperative. Correction isn’t easy, some is smooth and quick, some is painful,
repetitive, and can be haltingly slow, some may never happen. That is something
to work through piece by piece, rigorously, patiently and with unswerving
commitment and honesty. What has started to emerge is that not only is the
reality I see different to what I thought it was, but the illumination of it is
leading to further change. Like Heisenberg uncertainty. Who I was wasn’t who I
thought I was, and once I started to see who I am that started to change who I
am, and continues to change me. The protective shell which we cover ourselves
with during our ‘busy’ years can be broken off bit by bit exposing our true
selves to light, renewal, growth.
This
is also true of the dynamics of our existence. I see failures and limitations
of my progress in all dimensions (sometimes even those where I thought I was
highly successful) caused by who I truly am or was. I have also seen and been surprised
by strengths and successes that I either didn’t know I had or had ignored or
discounted earlier. I have had a wrong assessment of my successes and failures,
my strengths and weaknesses, a wrong view of the dynamics of my past. There is
a big lag between reality and perception, we keep seeing weaknesses we may have
fixed, may assume strengths and characteristics we may have lost, may not see
strengths we have developed.
We
cannot go back and fix things, but we can recognize and accept them. This can
be unsettling with failures but it can be a relief to let things go. I now see
the natural limitations in myself that led inevitably to what I saw as
failures. They were often failures only in comparison to unrealistic
expectations I had of myself. Also, things I failed at at one point of time I
learned to succeed at later - it was not so much failure as learning, a part of
success not failure. Equally I began to see my successes in perspective, how
much was me, how much was circumstance, how much was others, how much was not
unalloyed success, if it was success at all. Some successes in one dimension of
life led to failure in a different arena, and equally some failures led to
success in a different aspect of life. The interaction between professional
life and family life is the best example, and I can see where I sacrificed
professional success for my family and vice versa. In sober judgment, we have
to assess failures and successes not only relative to our opportunities and
constraints, but over a wider arc of both life and time.
As
I went deeper, not only did the classification of some successes and failures
switch around, but even the definition of success and failure changed. In any
case it is difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins as they
are all so intertwined, and it is also difficult to separate my impact on them from
my inheritance from circumstance. Once we see this we can strive for
equidistance from both, view both successes and failures equally,
dispassionately as occurrences, not as successes or failures, without pride or
shame and with perfect equanimity. That’s the holy grail that sets us free of
the past. I am far from that, but also far from where I started.
As
an aside, while I have always thought of myself as a liberal, I now see many
flaws in liberal positions. Liberals are prone to creating holy cows that are
meant to be worshipped and adored, never questioned. Liberal positions can be
quite extreme, even absolutist, not measuring up to any standards of logic or
science. As I have sought to complete my thinking on various subjects, my
positions have gotten less absolute and more nuanced. We can shed the pride and
comfort of being a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’, and determine our position on
issues objectively and pragmatically, without being concerned about what will
be considered politically correct. As polarization between conservatives and
liberals is becoming starker across the globe, the danger for conservatives is
that the center will not hold, and for liberals is that it will.
Part
of this happens just due to availability of time. I can complete thinking on things
that I never had the time to fully think through in transience, because at the
time I had to make a decision, embark on a course of action. Also, situational
dynamics coupled with my own limitations and neuroses triggered responses in
the first 300/60, responses which might have been very different had I no
pressure of time and could think things through and bring more sober, objective
judgment to bear. Then there is the fact that now I am older, more experienced,
possibly even a little wiser.
The
other essential part is volition, the desire to straighten things out in your
mind. Slowing of life doesn’t necessarily lead to reflectiveness. Neither does
it lead to slowing of the mind which can race away wildly in crazy directions. Meditation
can help calm the mind and aid contemplation, and as I have started to observe
what my flow of thought consists of I have begun to see what causes me pain,
anger, joy, sadness and I can trace them back to their roots in my life, and
start to deal with them. And as the flow
starts to still a little, things appear more clearly, not distorted by the
turbulence of a mind on a tear from one subject to the next – or at least on
somewhat less of a tear. And as always, nothing succeeds like success: each issue
I deal with successfully removes ‘noise’ from the picture, and as the picture
becomes clearer that helps deal with more issues. A corrective, upward-onward
spiral.
This
last 100/20 coincides with the prescribed vedantic sanyas, renunciant phase of
life, and perhaps this was part of the purpose of sanyas - to deconstruct our
lives and see ourselves and reality with clarity, and to correct our attitudes
towards others, towards reality and towards ourselves, learning lessons and getting
to even keel as preparation for the next step in our spiritual journey and for
the journey into the next life. To get away from the forced activity, the rush
and tumble of earning a living and into a phase where we can gain greater control
of our own lives, activity and thought. To develop oases of stillness and
solitude in our lives even if we don’t actually head to the stillness of the
forest for sanyas can help still the mind and we can do so purposefully with
meditation and contemplation, the most essential ingredients of sanyas. Stillness
of course being relative and not absolute. The activity of my mind moved from nearer
the surface, held there restlessly through 300/60 by unavoidable relentless
activity, to greater depths, eased down by solitude and contemplation. This is
very much the path of spiritual progress, where the greatest requirement is
dimming of the ego. Completing my thinking on life is helping me see through
the constructs that my ego had built up to safeguard itself, to protect itself
from discovery. The aim has to be discovery and partial extinction, which is
the best I can hope for in this lifetime.
The
opportunity is to move further along the scale from a life just lived, to a
life fully examined. This is the reflective phase of life, where we can ruminate
over things in a multi-gastric fashion, examining, re-examining and fully
digesting what wasn’t fully digested earlier. And thereby seek the true wisdom
of age.
