Learning to thrive through life’s ups and downs for personal and societal well-being
Life is all about the dynamics of troughs and crests, twists and turns and ups and downs. A time-tested strategy and blueprint is to widen the territory of heart and embrace life in all its totality encompassing diverse beauty of euphoria and radiance on the one hand and despondency, despair and melancholy on the other.
Nature manifests the qualities of beauty, generosity, jubilation, compassion, kindness and ecstasy at alternate intervals but at the same time it manifests cruelty, ferocity and barbarism. So beauty and violence go hand in glove with each other in the drama of existence.
A descendant of Adam succumbs to the hard times and is blind to the summer after every winter although there is unequivocal succession of one to the other. This premature surrender to the tyrannous times takes a toll on the mental health of the individual in particular and the collective health of the society in general.
There are certain prerequisites to living a disciplined life as a human being. One of the prerequisites is to withstand the dissonant, inharmonious and dictatorial times with all possible strength and vigour and develop an intellectual eye to forecast the momentary and temporal nature of life in general and its questions in particular.
The essence of being a human across the gender lines is to deliver courageous exhibitions and enjoy the tussle and dissension of jubilant and adverse forces operating in the temporal mundane world. When a person arrives at the essence of things coming across, he sees things turn to rust though being hardest substances and simultaneously things going favourable which used to go the other way round. This is how one turns to be generous and remains in the servitude of humanity.
Feeding children with a golden spoon might crush the spirit of resilience and lead a way to crumble down to the harshest challenges and forget the essential spirit of piety. Unless there is a day, there is no night. This theory of polarisation suggests that you are bound to dwell in the world of ecstasy after a long and dark jungle of gloom provided you see a world of eternity in the temporal things and simultaneously keep your spirits high to construct the tranquil world in the heart of hearts.
P B Shelly’s poetic line is apt here as he says: if winter comes, can spring be far behind? There is nothing of permanent stature in this world. If you encounter green and salad days, they are there to be enjoyed for the shortest span of time as time doesn’t stop at beloved moments. The clock ticks on to the darkened shadows of the gloom after a blissful journey. An orthodox believer in God crumbles in the worst times and sees his faith penetrated and adulterated. But a lover of God enjoys the conflict of choice and chance, fate and free will, luck and hard work and above all despair and rejuvenation.
The didactic concern is life offers a plethora of manifestations of divinely ordained commandments but the pressing need is to percolate one’s heart with the mosaic of qualities of a true lover who unconditionally bears every odd and reaches his beloved spot after treading a road laden with thorns and difficulties where he sees a sunshine of eternity and Nature dances to the tunes of happiness and jubilation.
Shakespeare throughout his poetic career emphasised the atrocities of time on the hardest substances as well as the delicate creatures like flowers on the planet Earth. The creatures are not able to withstand the ferocious and harshest challenges of time. They grow old and become “earthen lamps” and wait for the speediest clutch of death. This state of affairs confines to living organisms and the hardest substances are no exception to it. They too face the same fate and grow rust on them. Their state of embracing rust symbolises their old age which is characterized by hopelessness, despair, cold receptions, fading of intellectual traits and the permanent adieu to the attractive complexion. European countries and many from the Asian and African subcontinent have established “old age centres” to compensate the loss which is met by the kinship bond.
Time spares none from its turmoil. However, there is an elaborate laboratory of jubilant scenarios of youth that yields productive yields and boosts the economic, social, and psychological state of an individual in particular and collective society in general. Young blood enjoys and romanticises the varied scenarios of Nature.
Unless there is a heart filled up with happiness, there is no happiness visualised and experienced. When you are deserted at heart, everything looks deserted to you although literally scenarios could be romantic and compelling.
So all the manifestations of life get started once we open our eyes after getting birth and come across different stages of life. Every stage of life comes up with it qualitative and quantitative characterisations. It is however to be stressed that “a king that is conquered locks oneself up in the world of depression and dejection instead of standing up and striving for the rejuvenated self to fight again and reign the roast and enjoy the fruits of laboured hard work and build a motivational storehouse to guide one’s future which can be dotted with the victorious signs.
The writer has obtained his M Phil in English Literature. He has served as a Lecturer in English on an Academic Arrangement in the School Education Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir. Currently, he serves as an English Teacher at the Radiant Public School, Batengo, Anantnag
By Aarif Mushtaq
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