Disappointments are the Ways of Life

The other day I was talking to my neighbor when her beautiful little daughter came running to her. She was very upset, she wanted to play with some kids in the neighborhood who were a little older than her but they refused to let her in. She fought a little but soon gave up and came crying to her mom for comfort and kind words. Instead, her mom told her - its ok honey “Disappointments are the ways of life you will soon outgrow this phase and move on!"
That touched me a lot. It’s not something new that she said but the way she said it. There was an ease to it. It seemed like she never forgets how life can be so unpredictable and can sometimes push us around in all different directions. She didn’t get angry at the other kids or taught her daughter anything negative against them. She simply gave her daughter a compassionate smile and asked her to take it easy…

When I got back home, I started thinking how we often forget that every occurrence or every incident that ever happened to us right from our childhood are just the different faces of life. And life does not have one single pattern to it. It goes through several upheavals at times. Because of our inability to focus at the larger picture we lash out our anger at the people who we think might be responsible for it. It could be our neighbor, our boss, our colleague, our friend, our relative or anyone. Whereas people are merely a source or medium in helping us realize that it’s the life that’s pushing us around…

Disappointments are definitely the ways of life but seen with a different perspective, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong in feeling it this way. In the absence of disappointments there would be complacency, which according to me, is not a healthy exercise for a meaningful existence. At least when we are disappointed at the outcome, it’s a reminder for us that we do see big dreams, that we expect a lot better from us, that our desires or expectations are still alive or burning within us. Failure in a venture is a way of telling us that we are at least capable of making an attempt at it. Being disappointed at failing in love is a way to tell that we are capable of falling in love! Getting disappointed at not finding the desired position or job is a reminder that this is what we wanted and could possibly get it with some alterations in strategy…

Its all about the light and perspective we see it in..

In fact those who ever said that they have never faced disappointments or failures in life probably never desired enough…

Life Without Technology

Last week my computer crashed and my life suddenly came to a standstill. Every morning the first thing that I do is go to weather.com to figure out what would be the appropriate clothing for the day depending on the forecast, especially in winters. Anything that I ever needed an answer for, Google came in handy and whoever writes on pen and paper any more? Now Microsoft office applications take care of everything. It takes care of capitalizing the letters for us, making sure we didn’t leave too much or too little space between the words or if the spellings were correct or not. Everything is being taken care of by my computer.

My life went helter skelter. All I ever talked to anyone that whole week was how sad I had been coz I didn’t have an access to the Internet and I had been totally cut off from the rest of the world. I tried various stores to have my computer fixed but nothing really worked and ultimately decided to wait until we buy a new on.

I walked out of my house one day and suddenly realized, much to my shock that the fall season was almost over. My backyard is so full of fallen leaves now that I wondered how I never saw that before. As always, when I got up next morning, I walked over to my work table when I remembered that my laptop does not work any more. Not knowing what to do I sleepily walked outside. As soon as I opened the door the fresh cool breeze touched my face and I was awake. It felt so refreshing to be outside on a pleasant morning. The last vestige of the fall colors still looked beautiful. I took in the beauty of the nature before my restless self took over.

Sitting still even for 10 minutes was hard. I would go back to my work room every 10 minutes to see in case my computer changed its mind and decided to work!! After a while my desperation and frenzy got on my nerves and I decided to take it easy. With this realization, my mind started navigating me through some wonderful collection of books and music that I had. I had bought them over the years but never found enough time to read them all. I decided to look around and explore some more. In the evening I went out for a walk in the woods to enjoy the fall colors. I had seen them all a zillion times on the Internet, as 10 beautiful places etc…but seeing them or feeling them through my senses in person gave me an entirely different perspective. The expanse which was missing on that 17” screen was overwhelming. I felt like a part of it, not some objective spectator. I also met with some friends there. I had been chatting with them on a regular basis online but looking into their eyes and exchanging smiles rather than smileys and using gestures rather than some incomprehensible abbreviations felt different.

I started to wonder, although it’s true that the technology has given us endless opportunities to explore things and brings home on our table the entire world, but it also takes away our power to analyze things. We have forgotten out ability to browse our mind and look for the answers or explanations inside, the quest for wisdom and truth is just one Google or Yahoo away. It does the analyzing for us, searching for us and viewing for us. There’s nothing that we cannot possibly do online. Buying, selling, dating, reading, writing, even marriage. That reminds me of an 8 year old child whose dad was looking for some information on the Indian god (Ganesha). He went to the temple, called up the priest and also his family in India. His daughter a little amazed at him said, “Dad I wonder why you are running around so much for this piece of information? Just go to ganesha.com and you are done”.

However, it should not be misconstrued as me having anything against the technology per se. It is an enormous tool to make our life a lot easier. But aren’t we doing away with the power of thinking, reasoning or analyzing? It should be used as a tool to enrich our lives without getting too dependent on it.

Technology, no doubt is making our life a lot easier and smarter but, meaningful……….??