in Prism of Life

Masterpiece in making

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“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingyā€¯: Seneca

It’s for our own convenience that we invented the concept of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. Essentially life is just one day lived approximately thirty thousand times i.e assuming a life expectancy of 82 years (nothing more than a conservative estimate). However, you get an opportunity to live only one day at a time. Where the past and future exists only in your thoughts. Therefore it’s entirely up to you whether you wish to entertain those thoughts in present or not.

Let’s assume your life to be a masterpiece painting. Where you are allowed to use single stroke of brush to paint one minuscule portion of that masterpiece everyday. Again assuming a life expectancy of 82 years, it simply means you are allowed to use approximately thirty thousand strokes to paint the masterpiece.

Now, few of the pertinent questions that you need to ask are:

First: Are we in a position to foresee and judge the quality of a masterpiece just by looking at few hundreds or thousand strokes of a painting?

Second: Can you imagine the final outcome of your masterpiece painting where you are pretty consistent and relentless in making those perfect tiny red square on the canvas on daily basis, just because the colour red happens to be your favourite one?

Third: Is it necessary to have a proportional correlation between the efforts and outcome?

Fourth: Are you expected to have a fulfilling experience through every stroke of your brush?

Let’s try and find out answer to each of these queries.

As far as first query is concerned, we are definitely not in a position to foresee and judge the quality of a masterpiece just by looking at few hundreds or thousand strokes of painting. But despite this we rarely refrain ourselves from passing our final judgement on the painting just by having a cursory glance. In fact we human species have developed ourselves into a fault finding machine.

Second: Here the final outcome of your masterpiece painting is anybody’s guess. An entire canvas painted in red colour doesn’t sound quite an interesting proposition.

Third: In real life there is hardly any correlation between the efforts and outcome. So don’t expect that life would always be fair to you. Invariably we all are in habit of denial, when it comes to accepting this aspect of life.

Fourth: Expecting to have a fulfilling experience through every stroke of your brush is nothing more than wishful thinking. Because you are always going to have multitude of experiences.

You often desire to derive your happiness in attainment of conditional goals. Which means you end up putting numerous conditions on your happiness, in the hope that if you somehow manage to fulfil those conditions you might achieve happiness. Whereas in reality, you are just postponing your happiness by putting those conditions.

You need to acknowledge that quite a hundred of pixels created by you might remain devoid of any colour: primarily representing your period of failures and struggles. And there is every possibility that it may arrive in cluster of pixels. Therefore it becomes very important that you don’t get discouraged by occurrences of this phenomenon. Because in larger scheme of things, those unfulfilling patches are pretty integral in making your painting a final masterpiece.

We can manage those period of failures and struggles by learning to express our gratitude towards what we already have. We spend so much of our time in looking up at the great things that might come our way and planning our future happiness in great detail. And in the process we often forget that it was not very long back we were busy in wishing for things that we are possessing right now.

So I sincerely expect you to keep enjoying each and every brush strokes of your masterpiece, without being preoccupied with worries of final outcome.

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