Life

Life is extremely short.

Life is quite long, if you spend it wisely.

However, as once Einstein said, if you sit on a hot burning coal, one second will feel like eternity. If you sit next to a gorgeous woman (in your eyes), one whole lifetime will feel like a second. That is relativity.

I may have exagerrated but it’s the essence.

What I know about life is that it is full of possibilities, all the time. However, seeing those possibilities is all about how you look at them. It’s not always possible to see them. We usually want things our way, the way we want them to appear. If they don’t appear how we want them to appear, we simply ignore them.

Once upon a time, there was a priest in a village. He was very godly and religion was his whole life. One day, there was a huge storm and very heavy rain. People of the village were leaving there for higher groud and asked him to join them. He said

– No worries, God will protect me.

The villagers left and the flood reached covered the ground floor of the church. He had to climb up the church. When the flood was at the first floor level, he climbed up and saw a small boat with some villagers in it. They begged the priest:

– Come with us. We are going to safety.

– No worries, God will protect me, he responded.

And the flood increased and he had to go all the way up to the church bell. He saw some other people leaving in another boat. They were the ones who wanted to stay behind but gave up. They said:

– Come with us, we are going to safety.

– No worries, God will protect me, he responded.

And the flood increased and he had to climb all the way to the top of the highest point of the church, the top of the bell tower. Then a helicopter came by and they threw a rope ladder to climb. They begged him:

– Please come with us. We will take you to safety. This is your last chance.

– No worries, God will protect me, he said, while being very afraid at heart.

He died on that church tower and then went to heaven. He was brought before God. He asked:

– God, I dedicated all my life for you. Why did you not protect me?

God said:

– Who do you think sent the boats and the helicopter? You simply didn’t want to be saved. Or did you think I would come and save you myself?

– ??

No response came from the dead priest, as God was right. God sent him people first. And then more people in boats. Lastly, God sent a helicopter to save him. But the priest was looking for a different method of saving. His vision was quite different. That is why, he did not want to be saved in any other way. That is exactly how life is. If we truly understand or at least try to understand what life is about, what the happenings are about, we can get a good outcome. If we insist on how we want things, more often than not, we will be disappointed.

The main reason for this is that the world does not swirl around us. There is a very simple experiment we can make:

– Travelling to another city/country for a bit.

After coming back, we can easily see that when we were not there, the life did not stop. Where we went, the life was already ongoing and it kept the same rhythm after we returned. The world does not swirl arounds us. We are just a single part of a gigantic organism. Relatively insignificant. So, we cannot assume/expect the world to swirl around us.

In other world, we are the most significant part of our lives. We have to act like it. However, we cannot assume that we are a lot more important than we anticipate. It does not do any good either to ourselves or the world.

I prefer to manage my world, my time on Earth. Anything apart from that is nos important or significant.

And, we have quite a limited life/time on Earth. We cannot spend it on anybody else’s request. We should not.

The first step going forward is to understand what we want in this life. Then take the steps in that direction. It’s that simple.

Not easy. But that simple.

What do you think about life?

Do you think it’s complicated or simple?

Are we in control or we’re just some pawns?