(My first shot at writing something that qualifies as prose. One that was not for a school assignment anyway. The event was scrapped but I got an inkling of arranging my ideas more effectively. Or so I am left to believe..)
What is life, if not an illusion! One moment you’re high and shining, the other moment there you are, laid six feet under. You talk of how “real” things are, when change is all you’ve ever really known. And change is all you’ll ever see.
You go to school and hear all their lies. “The atom’s shaped like a sphere Johnny, not a football!”
And then college changes all that there was to the atom!
No I don’t mean to ramble on to my geeky side. But Homo sapiens from time unknown have longed to explain everything about everything. And while this does us a great amount of good, (God bless Franklin for electricity, Otto for my Ford. You’d think I’d thank Henry but well he’s had enough of that and is feeling bored. And Stevie for my iPod!), we do tend to become excessively presuming in telling which way the wind blows, and well that’s not going too far really. So correction – telling which way the wind blows, with accuracy!
Talking of this, who better to look at for words of wisdom than a 60s singer who made the trip and (more importantly) back! And so here’s Joni Mitchell rephrasing – well, undoubtedly because I can’t do it better.
“I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.”
Life. I don’t intend to go on about it as some philosopher would, for even the Oxford Dictionary becomes funny when it comes to the word. It leads you to go to page 17 for ‘alive’ and then have you return, laughing as you read ‘living, not dead’! So, I’ll just go by the said word only because Steven Tyler agrees. “Life’s a journey, not a destination”.
All our young lives we’re told of the beaten path, of doing what is “right”, going the “safe” way and eventually reaching a respectable position, socially and financially. But should life really be centred on an eventuality or even a certain one at that. The question that immediately pops into my head thinking of this is - what next?
Living in a country that’s still getting back up on its feet, where a square meal is the driving motivation for a large percentage of the population, it’s not hard to reason out why people don’t give themselves a chance to do what they really want, to let themselves go.
And when we’re far down that road, we have an epiphany, well phrased by Mark Twain – “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.”
Growing up, all of us have dreams – dreams that change every day and finally a few that stick with us for a long time. Dreams, some of us keep inside which later turn into fantasies and then into ‘How-I-wish-I-had’s, while some go after their dreams barely caring about anything else. And a few of them actually make it, and the ones that don’t (even though this sounds a lot like the movies) – will not have to wonder all of their remaining lives, “What if”!
These are the very people who manage to take the leap, to try to take control, to see and to try to realise their dreams, put their passion to work, their minds to test and hope for their hopes. A person is often considered a fool for believing in his dreams. But to his wandering mind, there’s no bigger reality than his illusion, nothing so powerful to drive him the way his “illusion” would. For he loses, the sense of illusion and reality in the space he creates and as far as reality goes, it wouldn’t be too trivial to tell that its concept is changing every minute! The second that passed ago knew a different reality, so to speak and quite rightly.
If a person has the kind of passion that would induce in him the confidence to believe, his chances of tasting success would increase manifold. To prove that, let’s observe a simple life example. You have a flight of stairs to jump down directly. Now say you tell your mind you’re capable of doing it, landing on your feet down those 7 stairs, safe and in a single piece, intact. And you jump. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to tell, there could be two outcomes, would it? And now for the other scenario – you take the leap half heartedly, half-mindedly, not believing you will make it and most chances are, you shall fail. If you’ve experienced anything of this sort before, it wouldn’t be too hard to tell that believing makes things easier, increases your chances of making the jump!
And so it goes with everything else we do in our voyage de vie. Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, could have easily had his lights turned off with the 2000 failed attempts he had made at the light bulb (and one can imagine people wouldn’t have had too many nice things to say about that!) and well, there’s no point in telling what would have happened of our lights! Instead he chose to carry on and when he reached his goal, he said, “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”
As amusingly inspiring those words sound for a 67 year old to say after seeing his loss of over 2 million dollars, it’s not quite surprising why those words seem right off a different time and way of life for our generation, with a little bit of exploration and analysis. In a competitive and absolutely unforgiving world like ours (or one it has come to become), it’s quite literally hammered into us that anything but the gold is a failure, anything other than the ‘correct’ answer is wrong. We lose out on the essence of action in becoming so objective and therefore forget that failures are nothing but signposts to lead us to the right way.
And the worst result that comes from such objective and one-track minded thinking is the attitude to not try anything new. Thoughts and ideas are not the brainchild of only a genius. It’s the step forward that a person takes in realizing these ideas, that makes him a genius. And this is where most people stop for thinking them as impossible, absurd and plain simple illusions. For, even the ideas that seem most obvious to us now must have once seemed absurd. Certainly enough, the idea of men flying in the sky is no exception. When da Vinci first thought of a flying machine, people did not see the strength and prowess of his idea and after the Wright brothers brought that idea to life, the world as people knew it would never have remained the same!
These powerful things, ideas, as we know them are often interpreted to be illusions of the mind – mystical wanderings in which it seeks an abode for all its fantasies. And it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that, people who think these ideas are often considered as dreamers. But what are these fantasies but imagination and what is exploration and discovery, if not imagination! A wise man (needless to say who) once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.
The greatest inventions that Man has seen over the years weren’t the creations of people afraid of failure, afraid of moving away from the convention or being tagged as dreamers. So, let your thoughts flow, and let your imagination swirl – this may just be your only life, or as 50 per cent odds go, finding the answer to that may just not be possible!
What is life, if not an illusion! One moment you’re high and shining, the other moment there you are, laid six feet under. You talk of how “real” things are, when change is all you’ve ever really known. And change is all you’ll ever see.
You go to school and hear all their lies. “The atom’s shaped like a sphere Johnny, not a football!”
And then college changes all that there was to the atom!
No I don’t mean to ramble on to my geeky side. But Homo sapiens from time unknown have longed to explain everything about everything. And while this does us a great amount of good, (God bless Franklin for electricity, Otto for my Ford. You’d think I’d thank Henry but well he’s had enough of that and is feeling bored. And Stevie for my iPod!), we do tend to become excessively presuming in telling which way the wind blows, and well that’s not going too far really. So correction – telling which way the wind blows, with accuracy!
Talking of this, who better to look at for words of wisdom than a 60s singer who made the trip and (more importantly) back! And so here’s Joni Mitchell rephrasing – well, undoubtedly because I can’t do it better.
“I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.”
Life. I don’t intend to go on about it as some philosopher would, for even the Oxford Dictionary becomes funny when it comes to the word. It leads you to go to page 17 for ‘alive’ and then have you return, laughing as you read ‘living, not dead’! So, I’ll just go by the said word only because Steven Tyler agrees. “Life’s a journey, not a destination”.
All our young lives we’re told of the beaten path, of doing what is “right”, going the “safe” way and eventually reaching a respectable position, socially and financially. But should life really be centred on an eventuality or even a certain one at that. The question that immediately pops into my head thinking of this is - what next?
Living in a country that’s still getting back up on its feet, where a square meal is the driving motivation for a large percentage of the population, it’s not hard to reason out why people don’t give themselves a chance to do what they really want, to let themselves go.
And when we’re far down that road, we have an epiphany, well phrased by Mark Twain – “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.”
Growing up, all of us have dreams – dreams that change every day and finally a few that stick with us for a long time. Dreams, some of us keep inside which later turn into fantasies and then into ‘How-I-wish-I-had’s, while some go after their dreams barely caring about anything else. And a few of them actually make it, and the ones that don’t (even though this sounds a lot like the movies) – will not have to wonder all of their remaining lives, “What if”!
These are the very people who manage to take the leap, to try to take control, to see and to try to realise their dreams, put their passion to work, their minds to test and hope for their hopes. A person is often considered a fool for believing in his dreams. But to his wandering mind, there’s no bigger reality than his illusion, nothing so powerful to drive him the way his “illusion” would. For he loses, the sense of illusion and reality in the space he creates and as far as reality goes, it wouldn’t be too trivial to tell that its concept is changing every minute! The second that passed ago knew a different reality, so to speak and quite rightly.
If a person has the kind of passion that would induce in him the confidence to believe, his chances of tasting success would increase manifold. To prove that, let’s observe a simple life example. You have a flight of stairs to jump down directly. Now say you tell your mind you’re capable of doing it, landing on your feet down those 7 stairs, safe and in a single piece, intact. And you jump. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to tell, there could be two outcomes, would it? And now for the other scenario – you take the leap half heartedly, half-mindedly, not believing you will make it and most chances are, you shall fail. If you’ve experienced anything of this sort before, it wouldn’t be too hard to tell that believing makes things easier, increases your chances of making the jump!
And so it goes with everything else we do in our voyage de vie. Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, could have easily had his lights turned off with the 2000 failed attempts he had made at the light bulb (and one can imagine people wouldn’t have had too many nice things to say about that!) and well, there’s no point in telling what would have happened of our lights! Instead he chose to carry on and when he reached his goal, he said, “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.”
As amusingly inspiring those words sound for a 67 year old to say after seeing his loss of over 2 million dollars, it’s not quite surprising why those words seem right off a different time and way of life for our generation, with a little bit of exploration and analysis. In a competitive and absolutely unforgiving world like ours (or one it has come to become), it’s quite literally hammered into us that anything but the gold is a failure, anything other than the ‘correct’ answer is wrong. We lose out on the essence of action in becoming so objective and therefore forget that failures are nothing but signposts to lead us to the right way.
And the worst result that comes from such objective and one-track minded thinking is the attitude to not try anything new. Thoughts and ideas are not the brainchild of only a genius. It’s the step forward that a person takes in realizing these ideas, that makes him a genius. And this is where most people stop for thinking them as impossible, absurd and plain simple illusions. For, even the ideas that seem most obvious to us now must have once seemed absurd. Certainly enough, the idea of men flying in the sky is no exception. When da Vinci first thought of a flying machine, people did not see the strength and prowess of his idea and after the Wright brothers brought that idea to life, the world as people knew it would never have remained the same!
These powerful things, ideas, as we know them are often interpreted to be illusions of the mind – mystical wanderings in which it seeks an abode for all its fantasies. And it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that, people who think these ideas are often considered as dreamers. But what are these fantasies but imagination and what is exploration and discovery, if not imagination! A wise man (needless to say who) once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.
The greatest inventions that Man has seen over the years weren’t the creations of people afraid of failure, afraid of moving away from the convention or being tagged as dreamers. So, let your thoughts flow, and let your imagination swirl – this may just be your only life, or as 50 per cent odds go, finding the answer to that may just not be possible!
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