… And They Lived Happily Ever After!

These six words are the most deceptive ones that each of us need to watch out for and be cautious about, for can there be such a situation. It makes me wonder and ponder the sense of satisfaction we get on hearing those words.

If as children, that satisfied our appetite of listening to a story of struggle, pain, and exploitation, that reached a logical conclusion of victory over evil. Representing Good was a personality or a group of people, with a hero who were anointed as the winners. The Evil obviously was the one portrayed as a Loser, with most endings portraying total elimination, annihilation or abject surrender. To surmise was this great line of …and they lived happily ever after!

A beggar on the road with tattered clothes and a frail frame was begging from home to home, presenting a sales pitch of `I have not had food for xx days, I am hungry, please feed me, and the almighty will bless you.’ Out of total sympathy, you fall for this and decide to feed the beggar, as this gives you the satisfaction of having done some good, and the beggar having satisfied the immediate need of eliminating hunger. So the beggar was the winner, for he got what he wanted; and you too were the winner for you gave what you had – maybe in excess or decided to share.

That sense of satisfaction leads you to a world of illusion that this point forward, the beggar shall live happily ever after, for you satisfied the hunger pangs. The journey actually begins, for both parties to savour the moment and get on with life. But you like to pause at that moment and loathe over it, while the beggar gets on with life and delivers his sales pitch of `I have not had food for xx days, I am hungry, please feed me, and the almighty will bless you.’.

As a child you yearned for something desperately, and pitched your desire in appropriate ways, shouting, crying, exhorting, protesting, till you reached your goal of attaining that object. Having achieved the state of desire, you again tend to loathe over it, without realizing that you have to get on with life. If it was permission for an occasion, you had to live up to it, if it was an object of desire, you had to learn to cope with it. This continues across various stages of life -- be it teenage, adult, mature adult, parent, grand parent. You tend to follow this pattern.

What is the beginning of a journey is often confused at the destination itself and that gives you a good orientation of being misdirected, moving in a haphazard manner, in search of a destination, when you think you have already arrived.

Where am I, Where do I want to be and How do I get there, are the three questions that you need to be asking yourselves, for should you ever not want to introspect on these questions at any time in life, you start living the illusions of being a `winner’, and you are bound to fall.

But the person who displays a sense of awareness has no qualms about accepting that he is a person in search of newer destinations and never wants to rest in the quest of exploration is the perceived loser. For such a person, setbacks don’t matter, for they perceive it as challenges and for them reaching the final destination, without getting distracted by the so called illusory pleasures, does!

The choice is yours – loathe the moment and feel as the winner, because you can say ... and you lived happily ever after, or get on with life, for you have many more things to achieve!