It is one am during this not very cold January, my favorite month of the year and I am laying sleepless on my bed trying very hard to sleep. Tried reading, listening to soft music and even watched some ten fifteen videos on YouTube about how to fall asleep in ten minutes. After wasting around one hour like this, I just left everything aside and started counting the glowing stars on the ceiling above me. My roommate had stuck them on my birthday to make the room more illuminating during the night. I fell asleep counting stars in the sky many a times as a child when we used to sleep on the terrace during hot summers. Those were the days of childhood. Summer vacations and spending those vacations at your maternal grandmom’s place used to be a thing. Making new friends there, playing their games, sleeping on the terrace under the open sky, and learning a lot other things. And then, we grew up, summer vacations are now converted into summer breaks, grand mom’s no more to visit her, and friends there aren’t the people I used to know any more. Counting these glowing stars on my ceiling and revisiting this outgrowing from people made me ask myself, what have I become after all these years? Have I actually not done anything substantial as my kins point out every now and then? What am I? Why am I even alive still? And many such existential questions came up.
While these questions were coming up, slowly like a snake the last chapter of a book by Devdutt Pattnaik I was reading lately crawls up on my mind. It has a lot of philosophical statements which could be an answer to some of our questions but yet, it’s not the bhagwad geeta which has all the answers. The thought which came up from the book was, our flesh is just a wrapping around the soul. My identity is just a costume the soul is wearing. The soul would either rest in peace in heaven or change the costume once this costume decays. And flesh decays after the death of our body. Just the thought of my identity as a costume for soul is very liberating. It just took me to a trance for a while and then reality creeps in. I live in a society, an urban society. Where validating each an every action becomes necessary, where we need to mend our ways according to the norm of the society we live in, which is again a contradicting to a thought I found comforting me lately, libertarianism. But then, I live in a society, or at least the people I care for live in that notion of society.
If we want to live our life the way we want, we need at least two factors, one, our family and friends accept our definition of life, or the strength to live with the hope that eventually things will fall in place and second, the strength to put ourselves first otherwise, we’ll end up submitting ourselves to what society thinks about us, or what the society needs from us. And a third way to live it our way is just unfettering from the norms of the society when it conflicts with your idea of life. But then, man is a social animal. He needs a companion to survive. The world is turning into an urban society, converting itself into a concrete jungle. For the jungle, it doesn’t matter what form of the flesh your soul is carrying. In the jungle you are either a prey or a predator. Living in a jungle of trees between animals without the materialistic comfort is more than difficult for today’s world, and living our life our way is not less difficult too. Our life can be measured on a scale of living in the jungle of trees to concrete jungle with all the thoughts of liberty and submissions to other’s definitions of life and everything in between. One can live like a saint in the middle of all materialistic comfort and be brave enough to let go of the thought of what the society thinks of him even when they were taught to be what a society wants from them as a child, and I think that’s when you come in harmony with yourself. This thought gives me more strength and reasons to liberate myself from the thoughts of what society wants from me.
The sky gets bluer with the thought from where it all began, what am I? A soul wrapped in this costume who is wandering on earth to find a way to heaven! What is life? The journey of the costume, and all about the priorities and preferences of the costume.
Aarzoo 