To BE

I have often had this feeling that the world was moving in a different, if not in the opposite, direction. It may seem as though the world and I were in some feud. We are not in any conflict, but somehow the more pragmatic stand was absent in one of us. I think it was the world that was the more pragmatic; the world is not a poet.

It may be that the moment I defined the object of my love and affection, I sensed a certain discontent within, an inappropriateness of sorts, as if love was too monolithic to be rationed out to a selected few. Moreover, I felt a dissatisfying lacuna, an empty feeling, post the aforesaid definition of the object of my affection. 

As a result my temperament became what men call irresponsible. Unknowingly my interaction with persons whom I came in contact with came to border on selfish and utilitarian. I became a 'user' of the world with a distinct sense of separate I.

Had it been clearly intended by me to be thus and operate thus I might have taken the response of my fellows in my stride and made strategic amends rather than get confused and hurt. Amends I did make once I became aware of the feeling, but they were not 'strategic'. They came from a genuine need to change for the better. However, my attitude became more like a disclaimer, more apologetic than correctional. I began to be altruistic.That was another extreme. It was the opposite half of the undesired hemispheric negative between which the flow of temperance carried men to fulfill their destinies. That was not where a Buddha might have located his middle path. I had to be somewhere in between the extremes: neither selfish, nor altruistic; neither 'this' or 'that'. I had to just 'BE'.

How to "just BE"? Mind has this habit of engaging either with the past or with a dream. There are a few, miserly few, conscious moments in a day when one is in the flow. How to anchor there? It is when you pitch there that you are carried, miraculously almost, to the end from where you look back upon what has been your life and see with satisfaction that you have indeed made a contribution to life.

This is the one thing worth living for. At least it seems so to me. As for the world, you need to be in the 'flow' to be in it, for if you are outside of it, it is an illusion. To be aware is to be. To be conscious is to live in the world.