By Om Prakash Dwivedi
The script of human life is written in time. Each passing moment is the crude telling of our loss or gain. It is also the story of our speed of progress, in which only transactions matter. The starting point of this inquiry is the way we seem to have forgotten that what matters, in this thing called life, are interactions and engagements; to see life only through the lens of growth and pleasure may jeopardize others’ life stories, even one’s own self.
For if life may teach us anything, it is the profound understanding that life is a cycle of probation; that we strive for permanence in it is another matter. The irony is that this now is hardly lived, because the future haunts and tempts us, while the past is mostly buried.
One may add that the past shapes the present and the future borrows from it, and in this continuum, the liveability of the present is lost or erased. So, where is this lost moment of our present? How one lives this moment, this now, this life defines our entire life of probation!
Just like a puddle of water that flows onto the ground only to be absorbed by it, in the same way, the moments of our probationary life are absorbed by that unlived certainty or permanence we aspire to, just for ourselves. That unarrived moment remains a myth; in our pedantic search for it, we also lose the sense of our present moment and, in so doing, imperil others’ lives as well.
Permanence is a hoax, an impending moment that never arrives, yet we all crave it, try to rationalize it, and be optimistic about it. In fact, our degree of optimism can reach that level where one can rationalize numbers and data about growth by making everything and anything disposable. The rhetoric of optimism knows well how to maintain the balance sheet of life and disposability; it calculates every single moment in terms of loss and profit, oblivious of the fact that this life is like an aperture that may close at any time.
If our experiences keep changing our forms, even our appearances, then how can the aperture remain a single point of absorption and endless growth? After all, even the way we appear, think, and behave may never have any converging point, so much to expose the prolonged condescending voices of optimism. Macbeth realized this long back when he said,
“Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player.”
Isn’t it true that the illusion of a bright tomorrow has and continues to fool many of us, so that, as Macbeth would put it,
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day?”
Tomorrow is a scale, and its acme tip keeps moving upwards, leaving the past and present in a feeble state.
In other words, the strength of the present keeps nourishing the prospects of that unsecular future. It is unsecular because it is always already foreclosed, safeguarded as it is by institutional mechanisms. Also, it is unsecular because the present moment of many is borrowed to build a future castle for a select few.
Proponents may argue that no loss is permanent, but then one may also counter-argue that nothing is permanent in this life, and, therefore, one needs the present moment to be nourished and cherished for as many as possible. As Gabrielle Zevin’s character Alabaster avers,
“And what is love, in the end? [. . .] Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
In the tapestry of this probationary life, the only pervasive thing to be desired and encouraged is love. While growth is based on scarcity and betterment and hence future-oriented, in this present moment love is the only available thing that one can have. In this limited time that we have, love is the singular source of fulfilment of that sublime joy, which cannot be experienced in economic transactions and iterations.
For many of us, there may not be enough future, but certainly, there is this present moment that can be invested with love and care to make our lives more secular. The purpose of our life can hardly be found in that celebrated future because there is no future; it keeps evading and shifting like a mirage, or, like that momentary ripple in water when someone throws a stone at it. There is only this now, this present moment, which we can live and feel. This fact is convincingly demonstrated by the intellectual fortitude of the great Sanskrit poet, Kalidas, who summed up human agony thus:
Look to this day:
For it is life the very life of life……
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
It is in this moment, therefore, that one has to live, because it is in this very moment that one breathes. The question of growth is equally a question of how one breathes. Just as growth without any pattern or rhythm is detrimental, in the same way, breathing also requires a rhythmic pattern.
Contributing Author: OM PRAKASH DWIVEDI is Dean, School of Liberal Arts, Bennett University, India.
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