blind faith…

The thread that keeps our sanity together is a finely woven cloth of blind faith and unquestionable belief. Without something to believe in, we would be teetering on the edge of insanity with no one to save us.

I learnt this the hard way. To ‘realize’ that belief is ‘important’ during the years when the light from your eyes is ebbing away can be a dangerous thing. You can’t turn back and your newly discovered invention is of no use to you at this age. It is a revelation that you would rather have lived without

At 17, my first encounter with divinity was when I was home alone. My parents had gone out to meet somebody and I came down with a high fever. It was as if everything was planned. None of the imagery is clear to me right now, but the only thing I remember is the feeling of a loss. I wasn’t very religious from the very start anyways, even though I was born in a very conservatively religious family, but this incident left me soulless. It is ironic that the divine presence had come to inform me that divinity just didn’t exist.

In the beginning it felt good. The social outcast had found something within him that gave him a purpose in life. A purpose, uniquely his and which no one could take away from. Every time a new question cropped up in my head, it felt like a new revelation all together. It was great to feel that I had a gift for questions which had no answers.

But with the growing years, the high became shorter and the frustration that followed lingered on for many days. A new question gives you a high, because in the back of your mind, it opens up a back door to the universe. Something that no one has ever thought of before has been found, so there is a certain amount of investment in thought that needs to go into solving that question. But ofcourse over the long run, there are no clear answers to the questions of this universe. One question opens the doors to many more questions and the only thing that remains in your hand is a wisp of nothingness. The frustration grows.

Over the next 30 years, there was hardly anything about life that I didn’t question. Uncertainty led to indecision and my life grew ever more cornered. The world didn’t make sense to me. The bitterness set in because I could see people around me not asking the questions that I was, not concerned about why they are here. How could they be so cut off from the world, why couldn’t they see the bigger picture, not include all the variables affecting a particular situation?

A person who asks too many questions never gets anything done in life. I could never decide on anything because there was always a counter argument sitting in my head. At the age of 47, alone and frustrated, I looked back at those years and asked yet another question. What do we want from this life? For the first time in my life, I actually got an answer.

The pursuit of happiness and the hope of leaving this world after having made a difference are the only things that makes living life worthwhile

I, unfortunately, had not followed any of these. The questions left me dejected, bitter and frustrated so I was never happy. And a 47 year old bachelor, left by his family, isolated from his friends, and sitting on the brink of extreme uncertainty could hardly qualify to leave anything but a book of unanswered questions behind.

To realize that there are no answers and to accept this as a fact of life and to live with it, around it and embrace it without holding on to it for dear life is something every one needs to learn. The temptation to ask questions would always be there. After all man is a curious animal. But the flow of life should never be disturbed by something that we know can’t affect us. Running after an illuxon is pure stupidity.

The world is not about me or you. We will come and go away but this world would remain. It is about living the happiest life that we can and leave the world a better place than we found it.

Today I am the happiest person in this world and my legacy is to have written this story and to have showed the world that blind faith and unquestionable belief is the most important thing man can ever have. Today I give in to this world. My soul is consumed and merged with the soul of this universe. Today, ‘I’ cease to exist.