The World & I

I am curious about this world, really curious. Unfortunately, this curiosity is not satiated, because there are no certain answers to my questions. Every answer has a probability that even its probability cannot be verified. We are in a bubble of ignorance that has no wholes (or at least, I haven’t found a way out so far). The sad part is, that we can get our answers and not know if they are the truth.

We are in a twisted game with no way out between its start and end (Or is there a way out in between?!) There are transient moments when I am faced with the colorless reality of this world, and for a period after that, I am not beguiled by its colors. But the effect of this exposure fades away gradually and I am back to believing in the “seriousness” of this world and I interact with it as a normal event. How naive!

My problem with this world is, why should it exist at all? It’s a game that we have either deliberately chosen to participate in at some level, or we were heartlessly thrown in without having a recollection of what it is about and how to win it. Either way, for the majority of us (that I know of), the rule of the game is to (initially) not know what the rules of the game are. And we probably should first discover the rules in order to follow them to get to the solution.

But why should the path of the game be so bumpy? Why shouldn’t it be evergreen and serene like the wallpaper of Windows XP?

Or is it bumpy only for some of us and there are people who experience life as calmly as in the picture above? Now it’s a fact that everyone experiences death, loss, and maybe sickness, and if there are people who keep calm through all these events, the key to their serenity should lie in how they make sense of these events, not the event itself.

For a normal person who experiences the bumpiness of this life to some extent, there is a distance between the quality of his experience of sickness and health, death and birth, loss and gain. We define one as bad and the other as good and the distance between the bad and the good is what leaves us calm or in a struggle.

For those who see life intertwined with suffering, the distance should be large and they are either escaping from the bad side of the spectrum or clinging to the good side. There is always pain because one cannot only experience the good parts or escape completely from the bad side.

For those who experience serenity, the distance between the two sides of the spectrum is rather short. It doesn’t matter if they experience the death of a loved one or the birth of their child, they see and define both as experiences of life. And the experience is not tainted with a great valuation. They see life from a bird-eye view and birth and death, health and sickness are sides of the same coin, that exist together and they are what make life, life.

Good and bad are constructed in our minds. Outside of the mind, in the world, nothing is good, nothing is bad, it’s all relative, and those who interpret life as objectively as possible keep calm and remain equanimous in the face of whatever the rest of us call fortune or misery. Those who take their subjective valuation too seriously usually live in pain.

I am in transition. I still suffer (and sometimes gravely) from the things I do not want to happen. I get excited about the things I want to happen. I know there is this quality where I would treat both experiences as sacred and welcome both with the same inner peace. I am not there yet, but there are moments I can see life in that light. And I believe, that finding this serenity is one of the rules of the game (with 99% probability).