A meditative rose

I need new genes. I check too many boxes on family medical history forms. And since I doggedly refuse to get myself checked up, I don’t check any boxes on personal medical history. Did I ever mention how much I admire ostriches?

On a related note, if you were faced with your mortality, what would you spend the rest of the day doing?
a. Carry on with the plans you had - You always knew you were going to die eventually, so how is this news.
b. Make new, more exciting plans - Since you’re going to die, might as well get the most out of life till you do, starting now.
c. Mope around at home all day, then order pizza at night. Kick yourself for not getting a 27th floor condo with windows that actually open.

I’ve been thinking recently about how much I’ve changed in the last few years. I sometimes think once you decide to go down a certain road, ask certain questions, you can never go back. It’s like taking the red pill … you can be perfectly happy without knowing the ‘truth’, but once you do, there’s no way you can accept the illusion you’ve been living with. That way, you live a more intense life for sure, though it most definitely won’t be as stable or safe.

But what if you can go back? What if you can go back to looking for contentment and happiness and stability, as opposed to stimulation and intensity? Is it a choice you can make whenever you want, and are we scared to make it, just because it is a choice, and we hate all decisions?

If all you’re ultimately looking for is happiness (please, let’s not get into the suffering vs. happiness discussion - social conditioning or whatever, I do value happiness), does it matter at all how you get it? Is it possible to go back and be happy? In other words, if I chose to get married and live in the ‘burbs, is it possible that I would be happy?

Don’t panic … this is really me … I haven’t been abducted by aliens and been replaced by a bubbly, social, sundar, susheel, gharelu person … this is just me analyzing why we shouldn’t overanalyze things …

So why do we spend our time searching for the overarching, all-important purpose of our lives, or think we know what it is and keep trying really hard to mould our lives to achieve it? If there truly was something like this that governed our life, would we need to try so hard? If it was the reason for our existence, wouldn’t our lives revolve around it by instinct, without our even trying? Wouldn’t it be all we could possibly do? And all the things we didn’t do, we wouldn’t be giving up at all, because they wouldn’t hold any value for us.

So I think if we’ve formed a set of beliefs that we think are the gospel truth and should guide our lives, and we constantly fight our instincts to be true to them, we’re probably overthinking things a little too much. If those beliefs truly meant that much to us, we wouldn’t have to struggle. All that we could see would be those beliefs - there wouldn’t be another way to live.