Really? Or does your life “lead” you? Did it take your permission to decide your birth? The time, place, parents, or body? Or were you led to them? Events in your life keep happening daily as if with a will of their own. Things happen or don’t happen when you least expect them to.
What about your mind? Pray who leads whom?the mind , like a most demanding master completely controls you and makes you dance relentlessly. Fulfil one demand and it is ready with another. Ever in command, it demands immediate compliance and appeasement.
It can make you sorrowful or moody,wayward or sensitive, happy or wistful merely depending on its passing moods! Don’t we submit to its rule helplessly and shamelessly?
The body forces you to rest whenever it demands. It chooses to fall sick when you need to use it the most. It is a child when you long to be an adult, and grows old when you struggle to be young!
To your utter dismay and discomfort it changes fast. Hair falls, muscles weaken, energy levels drop and it bids good bye in a surprise move!
Illnesses come and overstay as unwelcome guests. So, is the body under your leadership or are you in its humble service, daily led by the nose? Earning for it, feeding it four times a day, bathing and clothing it, nursing and decorating it, are you not its faithful slave?
Life happens to you when you are making other plans. Why is it so?
The present has to be caused by a past, known or unknown, and the present sows the seeds for the future to unfurl.
“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Its an inexorable scientific law. The Hindus call it “karma”.
Prarthna Saran, President Chinmaya Mission New Delhi.
Email: prarthnasaran@gmail.com