The thinking corner: The questions to life..

I know this might be a wrong time to start a new set of posts as I may not really get the time to follow up on it for quite sometime, but have been meaning to do this for quite a while now. My brain keeps running with some serious thoughts sometimes and I feel like putting them up in a post, but somehow they become too many and then I don't feel like writing anymore. Recently, I joined a group on Facebook and managed to post a set of thoughts there. Thats when I got the idea of doing this on my blog - a themed set of posts where I ponder seriously about something that takes over my brain. Hence, presenting the "Thinking corner". I don't want to push this any more, so lets start off without delay :).

There are many times when I wonder why we are here. Why are we born? Why do we live? Why do we die? Are we just specks of dust that are aware that they exist? Or do our lives really make a difference anywhere in this vast universe?

We all know that our lives affect atleast a few. Imagine concentric circles with the centre point being you. Your spouse or significant other is the first circle. Your parents, children, in-laws make up the second one. Your best friends form the third, first set of relatives the fourth, so on and so forth until your acquaintances make up the last circle. Most of the time, your life affects only these concentric circles and never ventures beyond the acquaintances circle. Yes, people in public lives like authors, celebrities or politicians go beyond these circles and affect the lives of strangers. But for a normal human being, the acquaintance circle is the end of it. And the nearer the circle to the center, the more the effect of your life, meaning the effect of our lives decrease as the circles become bigger. So who does my life impact most? Me.

My life belongs to me the most. Your life belongs to you the most. My life makes a difference, to me. We have all heard of reincarnations (life beyond the current life), souls and ghosts. Its all good to hear, but we don't have solid proof for any of it. Death might be the complete stop for everything we know. So for all we know, this might be the only life we have. We may not get another chance like this. I do not believe in past lives, I may have had them, but I don't remember them anyways. And so it goes for future lives as well. I have been extremely lucky in getting the sort of life I have now and I may not be so lucky even if there are future lives. Hence I believe in taking full advantage of the only life I have, in living as much as I can in the short duration we have in this world. We don't know what tomorrow holds for us. The question you have to ask yourself is this "If tomorrow is the end of your world, would you have regrets?". If so, then you need to make changes so that you don't.

We all know that we have to compromise and make adjustments for things in our lives to go smooth. But if the compromises and adjustments you make are causing you unhappiness, then are they really worth it? At the risk of sounding extremely selfish, there is a limit to everything, even personal sacrifice. If you are the only one making compromises and nobody else is even putting in the effort, then its bound to cause regrets at a later point in life when you look back and see what you have been through. There is just no point in bending to everything and everyone and later complain about how you have sacrificed all your life. Sometimes, to live your life, you have to be assertive (not aggressive) and let people know what you expect in a clear manner.

Though some of the following might sound like cliché, I have seen people never expressing what they feel to their family members, not showing they love them; People not taking vacations despite being able to do so financially, not spending enough moments with their spouses or have spare time for their children; People whose aim is only to make money and not really spending it for a worthy cause; People who don't help others in need or contrastingly do help, but only to show off; People making promises they never keep; People who are total hypocrites, preaching something while they do something totally opposite. Is this really how we want our one and only life to be? Ultimately, we are the ones living our lives, we are the ones making all the decisions. Live in the moment and try and make a difference.

All this being said, I don't have answers for any of the questions I asked in the first paragraph of this post. The fact is we may never have the answers. Everybody doesn't have the privilege of searching for answers, many don't have the financial circumstances for it and many others don't have the interest. Still others go for religious and spiritual guidance to look for answers. Yet others have pondered the questions, have decided that they probably will never know the answers and are satisfied with that. There are all kinds of people in this world. What works for someone need not work for you and what works for you need not be the solution for someone else. Whatever makes you happy is the key to life. Live and let live.

"The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42"- by Douglas Adams in " The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

"So if your life flashed before you,
What would you wish you would've done?

Yeah, we gotta start
Looking at the hands of the time we've been given
If this is all we got and we gotta start thinking
If every second counts on a clock that's ticking
Gotta live like we're dying

We only got 86,400 seconds in a day to
Turn it all around or to throw it all away
We gotta tell them that we love them
While we got the chance to say
Gotta live like we're dying"
- Kris Allen in the song "Live Like We're Dying".