Embracing life
Megha Bajaj believes that life goes on no matter what, but focusing on the positive will stand us in good stead
The thing about life is that it continues. Happiness and strife, as well as easy and challenging times, may come and go, but life continues to flow. I went through a purple patch in my career. Things looked up like they never had—my online training course in writing was thriving, as was my centre for children. There was abundance all around me. And then, something went wrong. Things started going downhill. In fact, it was such a downward spiral that I wondered if I would be able to
What the numerous books and videos on positive thinking forget to tell us is that it is not enough to just think positively. It is also important to deepen the feeling of positivity, making it so intense that it has no choice but to reoccur.
It is not that happy people don’t face challenges in their lives or that unhappy people don’t experience goodness in their lives. The entire game is to gain mastery over our thoughts and emotions; deepen the good, so much so that the challenges start appearing very tiny, almost insignificant, before all the magnificent good.
Conversely, some of us deepen the negativity, triggering its survive the loss. And then again, a ray of hope came bursting forth. That’s life with its ups and downs, ebbs and flows, and days and nights.
I met someone who had just lost his mother as well as someone who had given birth to twins—both on the same day. It got me thinking about life and death; they’re woven in so intricately into the design of the cosmos. This coming and going—it’s a continuum.
Good and bad will keep reccurring. Deepen the good as much as you can and leave the bad as shallow as you can.
Let me explain with the help of an analogy. If you hold your thumb too close to your eyes, hindering your sight, you won’t be able to see the sun. But if you hold it away, you realise that it was obstructing the sun. Similarly, we hold our challenges too close to our hearts, blocking the positivity and allowing negativity to define our lives in so many ways.
Good and bad will keep recurring.
I went through a phase in my life when I was in the pink of health. I could do all that I wanted to. Then came a time when my body was riddled with aches and pains; energy levels had fallen, and it was tough to even get out of bed. After that, once again, things turned around. I’ve been super healthy sometimes and at other times not as much, but life never stopped on the basis of my feelings. It always did what it must—flow.
How do we, fragile as we are, make sense of this coming and going, this high and low in life? How do we, so in love with certainty as we are, make sense of this inherent uncertainty and ride the waves instead of drowning under their sheer weight? The answer I have arrived at is: Deepen the good as much as you can and leave the bad as shallow as you can. Let me explain. The design of life is such that it creates a pattern of reoccurrence of that which we deepen.
Birth and death will be part of our lives as long as we inhabit the body. Duality is the very fabric of life, and paradoxes, its very nature. But the one who makes life count is the one who has finally understood. Deepen the good, own it, celebrate it, and cherish it; you will understand and believe that life is beautiful. So beautiful! Let the bad times be shallow experiences that come and go while accepting them without undue importance. I wish you a fulfilling life complete with all its paradoxes. May you be happy, centred, and loving through it all.
An award winning author, film-script writer and poet, Megha is an eternal seeker at heart. She also empowers people to write and get published through her online
writing workshop. You can read more on www.WonderofWords.org