A well deserved painful life

Somehow today I feel like touching the topic of pain and joy. Something that we want to avoid and keep to ourselves respectively. "Respectively"; that's the word that's of importance here to most of us. Or so we are made to believe. That we should be looking for and something that's good, something that makes us and others happy. But over a certain of period of time, I realized that pain is inevitable and rather a very necessary entity in life. 

Let me give an example. Throughout my curriculum in my Masters, life has been crazy. Assignments and projects made me stay up till 3 & 4 AM, and the early morning job gave me 1- 11/2 hours of sleep kinda just enough for sleep to prove its point throughout the day that "yes, we rule you". And then there are no excuses. Whether at work or attending lectures after that, or crosschecking your concepts before you click on that "Submit" button when submitting assignments online. There is simply no excuse, no matter how hard you try. 2-3 days in a week without sleep at night or few hours of sleep had become a thumb rule. And then comes along this semester. With simply research to finish off the course, there are no assignments, no labs, no deadlines. "I would be so happy with absolutely no pressure in life", was my presumption. It was fun initially, no much work, no worries. And then it starts getting on your nerves. And that's when I realized how much I loved that life even though I used to crib, complain and wait for that golden time of relaxation then. And it further reinforced my belief that pain by itself is what makes this life worth living. Pain is necessary for relief to make its presence felt. Relief and comfort by itself have no meaning at all in this life. Not without their complements.

And I realized that this is what our life is all ever about. There are downs and then there are ups which we crave for. If you understand simple high-school physics, then let me try explaining this concept. Consider your life as a fast moving vehicle on a straight line. Is it possible to suddenly go upwards? No. Not without a depression. The depression exists only to thrust you upwards. Get the point? We would never ever know what "good" is; unless we know what "bad" is like. And even if we had all good in life, we would never really value it. And its always the rare and hard to find things that are treasured in life. Whether it is money after a series of misery, a love after a series of heartbreaks, or success after a long series of rejections and dejection's. Its inescapable and its necessary. 

And then comes along the times of the better, the craved for opposites. Does it not become surprisingly easy to go towards what we want then? There are no hesitations, no second thoughts, no uncertainty. Its all so clear, as if you could somehow feel what that guy up there has in mind for you. Was this possible without the darker side?

The wrong paths are necessary, the pain necessary, the darkness necessary and the uncertainty & worries necessary. Its only after we know what they are that we can recognize their counterparts. And without them life is incomplete and meaningless in a way we could not imagine.

Why is it so hard to accept?

This is not any of my philosophies, or at least I don't think so. I am trying to simply capture what I am feeling and what I assume every person feels at some point or the other. It strikes when everything in and around you seems to be going fine, you seem to be enjoying your work, studies, etc. and suddenly there appears this moment when you simply have no faith, no hope, no enthusiasm, no needs, no wants and no desires. Its a blank moment, when you simply don't know what to do, not that you had something that you were thinking about or something that you were worrying about, but that everything simply seems pointless, senseless. And you start wondering about all the things that have happened in your life so far and which are happening right now.

Many a times, there are these times when there is a lot of chaos around you; your work place, your classroom, any random place and you just want to be alone in your mind, just to think nothing. And so we thought. And I realized that it is in these times when you do the most critical of thinking, look and analyze at everything that you have been doing and people have been doing to you, and situations that have been controlling you. And then you suddenly feel the need to know how something else started controlling you. And so we start being true to ourselves, we no longer hide things that we normally hid from ourselves during our normal dormant thinking. And then begins a journey of a road less traveled. 

Most of such thinking comes around when you want to take a decision about something that you never realized was bothering you. And you immediately recognize the burden that you have been carrying around for a very long time and suddenly you feel the desperate need to solve it. 

As I always believe, you generally tend to crib and cry about the things that go wrong in your life and often start praying for what you want. What you never understand is that while you are so busy only looking at the shorter solutions and roads to make your own life easy, you can barely understand the effect that a good or a bad even has on your future path. And its as if the guy up there was creating these events cause he knows the better path for you. So its always for the good. Now while this is easy to say, its almost impossible to do or live it even though you know that it is the right thing to do. Its like these two brains; one which always gives you these correct solutions, which you deep down somewhere know is true and the right thing to do. And then there is the other one which wants to just  end the crisis or the pain for you and go back to your "familiar" situation which you have accepted as a part of your life. And you suddenly wonder if these two parts of your brain are even connected together.

The truth is, if you have sat down wondering about anything at all, chances are that you were already thinking about a lot of things that you were not even conscious about. And sometimes there are no solutions at all. It's that way probably because its just not yet the right time for you to get the solution, not just the time for you to be calm or start flying. In short, simply not your time.  It sure pains a lot to feel helpless, to feel like a puppet dancing on strings. But you have to understand that you are still a puppet cause you don't have the strength to stand on your own. Its time to simply go through the pain like a small bird coming out of its egg. The pain is necessary to help you stand and fly. And it is this very pain that will work wonders for you down the path less traveled.

The fourth dimension?

For a long time now, everyone at one point of time or the other has wondered about the 4th dimension. That there exists a world beyond ours, something that we believe exists but are unable to communicate with. Many of us have convinced ourselves that the fourth dimension is that of time. And that there is no way for us to break this barrier to communicate with the world beyond.

Having thought about this thing long enough, one thing seemed to stand out. The concept of ghosts, UFO's, aliens....the list is long. What if the barrier was not time? What if the barrier was we, ourselves? Confused?

Now we all know that there exists 105 or 107 elements (or so I thought....I checked it up and now there seem to be 118 elements). Anyways, we humans, animals and all living creatures are made up from few of these elements that we know exist. Our life and our world consists and revolves around these elements that we know. We can touch, feel, hear, sense, eat, breathe, drink (and maybe see?) anything that's made up of these elements.

Now what about the elements that we don't know about? We humans use tools, devices, technology and knowledge related to these elements. How could we believe that we could somehow tap the other world when our basic make-up, knowledge and basic existence revolves around only about 100 odd elements?

It is very much possible that there exist many more groups of such 100 odd elements, right here, right where we sit. And it is also possible there exist forms of 'life' made out of these different elements that we are inherently limited from discovering or knowing. We have our world made out of the elements we know. Our perception of the world will revolve around these only. At the same time, this Earth may seem to be made of different elements to life-forms made from a different set of elements. They may perceive this very world and space in a very different light. In fact the perception itself may depend upon the set of elements that their 'life' is made of.

Coming back to the point where I started, it is quite possible, that there are many life-forms around us, on this very Earth, living a life along with us, parallel to ours while we are busy searching for them somewhere else. And maybe the ghosts and aliens and other life forms that we talk about are merely due to some error in some elements, crossing boundaries they were not supposed to cross.