The world and I

I was confronted with a like it or lump it situation in my professional life. It was not the first time. Like most people, I neither liked it, nor could I leave it, because that didn’t solve the problem either.
It was not something that could be called a compromise, but simply a case of encountering reality. Wherever you went you encountered the inevitable. A lot of it had to do with ‘others’. ‘Their’ behaviour and ‘their’ decisions affected my life, altered my physical living conditions, dictated my time…’they’ almost ruled over my soul.
I was standing face-to-face with a strange paradox—people, ‘other’ people, affected my life in ways I didn’t like but could do little to change. What could I do? Practically nothing to produce immediate results, change the decisions of ‘others’ that affected my life, and leave me at relative peace.
The only choice I had was to alter my mind, change my perception just to survive—since I didn’t have enough power to change external, physical circumstances. Then I would become ‘the other’ for other people! You are either the hunter or the hunted. Can you ever come out of the hunt? Can you ever be really free…?
A practical way out would be to accept the notion that desire breeds misery and abandon desires both noble or otherwise.
But that would be escapism—creating the facade that since something is too difficult to achieve, pretend that you don’t want it! It would not lead to an authentic change within—it would be a cheap mental ploy for a loser to experience a false and fleeting feel-good state.
That is what I would call a compromise. I don’t know what enlightened masters would counsel me but for now this is my plan… To harbour deep within my heart the seeds of discontentment, to slowly nourish them till they grow and flower into something fruitful… In practical terms this would mean to keep trying both in the inner and outer world for a change till…well, till you get it. Meanwhile, I’m coping with ‘the others’!
-Harvinder Kaur

( www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1028723 - 49k;Wednesday, May 10, 2006)