Skip the suffering and suffer the skipping

Time is a tricky thing. When you have too much of it, you wouldn't know what to use it for and when you have too less of it, you wouldn't know how to manage it in the best way possible. So, the problem never was time, it is how you perceive it and how you plan to preserve it.

When you do talk about perception and how it works, let's take life for instance. Most people see it as a race. Technically, it may feel right. There is a start, there is an end and in between everybody tries to compete in this unannounced battle to do something better than the other. But the reality is that the stakes are never balanced or fair to anyone or anything to make a fair comparison. If everybody is playing the game, who is the referee and who is even making the rules for the referee to follow?

The way I see it, everybody is a clueless fool about something or the other in life and the struggle is always for us to hide the clueless part with things we know to the best. That's the reason clarity is rewarded and seen with great regard in this clueless world. Never lose the power of clarity amidst the fogged up society.

Now that we have set the stage, let us see more nuances in life, like maybe a job. Most people do a job to get by their daily needs and earn to make life easy. But look at it from the perspective of the person hiring you. The entire hierarchy in your organization is just a clever ladder of handing out responsibilities. You are hired to make someone's life easy. The person who hired you has a set of many responsibilities to handle and they hand a few to you like they do to others, and you are supposed to make that person's life easier than it normally would have been if they had not hired you. The same was done to them by the people above them. When the business that you support does do well, you are rewarded with a piece of it as a salary. If you need to break down money as a concept then, it is just a token of appreciation where a person parks or invests a certain amount of money on you for making their life easier with the work you did and they hope to retain you for a longer period of time because they like their life easy. Of course, all of that is an ideal situation when all odds work out, and when they don't, you learn a newer and better lesson.

The very intent to survive in this fancy made up race and make money is nowadays labelled and validated as a normal life. But let us break it down a little further for better clarity. To make someone's life easier, you do need to compromise on your own self and your own life sometimes, because the stars and situations are not meant to align with you always by nature, law and reality. So, through the course of this journey, you might lose out on your family, health and your own conscience as well. The stakes are only best known to the person playing rather than the audience observing. The compromises will never end, but the point is to reminisce about them every once in a while and understand how to compensate that compromise to the best of your power, before it reaches to the ignorance part of your life beyond which you cannot go back to that version of yourself where you didn't have to make this compromise. You will never know or understand that part of you anymore. You might then go on to successfully end the race, but then majority of who YOU are will be lost to it. Just a price to pay for the pretty prize, I guess.

You may ask, why do you say so? Maybe things might get better when you reach a certain position in life and to get to that we are bound to suffer a little. True, things might change, but they are never bound to be in a way that you like or have a preference. Once you do enter the race, it will get more convoluted, cunning and cut-throat towards the end of it. Think of it this way, if you did a very good job at something and then you were given a promotion for the same, you are also going to replace someone else. When you do replace someone else, you are not brought in to behave or drive results the same way they did, because if that is all they wanted, they never would have promoted you to begin with. You are given growth in the belief that you will do something different and better, and how exactly can you do that? By compromising on fronts that wouldn't impact your organization, which in turn compromised your life once again. That is how the vicious cycle keeps moving, and the head spins every now and then to give you a signal about the same. But I guess we were too occupied with the race to care about it.

So, what is the point of it all?

The point is that when we are too absorbed in a certain vision or aim to make something in life, we instinctively choose to drive on autopilot in insignificant matters of life. You will just exist in the moment but would not realize the weight of it until a moment in future brings back this part you skipped, back to your mind, mentally. In essence, we try to skip the suffering and we are bound to suffer that skipping.

It always is and will be a constant of suffering whether you wish for it or not. And unfortunately for you, you do not hold the power to manipulate time and its timelines yet.

So, live in the current and focus on right now, rather than waiting for the right time. The right time never feels right when you plan and prepare for it. It is only the right time when you don't look forward to it, even though the very thing that happens doesn't sit well with you or doesn't seem right for you. Because that, in itself, is the clearest sign that it was always meant to be exactly that way.