The Burden of making a Resolution

If you browse through the popular, and not so popular, social media timelines, there is an overwhelming volume of messages on positive thinking. These messages range from everyday psychology to high thinking philosophy. Sometimes backed by extraordinary stories of people who have overcome odds to emerge.

However, in spite of such overwhelming positive thinking, positivity seems to be a rare and difficult ambience. If I look through the last 2 to 3 years, it does almost feel like one continuing year of negative milestones, I begin to question the most foundational assumptions of my life, my interactions and my aspirations. It is my experience that, increasingly, I am perpetually and desperately searching for silver linings that are getting rarer and rarer to find. And this search for the minutest of bright lights, and the need to celebrate even the minutiae, has become the raison d'etre for clawing through existence.

I call it existence having considered very well how negative that sounds. And yet, no event of significance from the year past provides me the inspiration to look up from the calligraphy of loss, struggle and sorrow that have taken root in the narrative of everyday life. Nothing that can elevate the average existence to meaningful living. All there is, is a world full of people who are in perpetual dance motion to tunes that are not of their own composition. It's not a new sensation ar state of being except that the character of the music made by the few, for the many, has morphed into a monotonous crescendo of greed, gluttony and malice.

Both the Mahabharata and Shrimad Bhagavatam give a vivid description of how things are like in Kaliyuga. And so much of this is true in everyday life if you are willing to allow yourself to be subjected to the unbearable process of introspection. Deficit, greed, selfishness in almost every interaction, loose and convenient relationship with virtues, and the incessant need for means (money) have made our everyday lives into a race of no purpose. Everyone of us is racing only with our own shadows. And as we have learnt to sequence genes and predict predisposition to diseases, we have forgotten the nuances of being human, and more importantly, we have forgotten the foundations of what makes us, collectively, a civilization. We have stopped caring, connecting, and forgetting how to feel without the need for public display. We continue to indulge to no end, and do not even see the exhaustion so much sharing and information in the form of positive sermons covering up bad news.

I am weary to the center of my bones. And the act of even trying to create resolutions for the future seems like a burden too heavy to carry. But if the last few years have taught me anything it is the fact that I need to reconnect. Reconnect with lost friends, reconnect with places, and most importantly, reconnect with the lost art of feeling. It is an ambitious aim. But I hope to make some progress in pulling my head out of the sand and looking up at the sky.