Just like how loneliness is agony worse confounded by murky isolation and solitude is bliss, optimism always emerges in the midst of growing turmoil. What can also turn the tide is simple — little drops of empathy that bring about more than a sense of harmony, or calm. This occurs primarily because of the expanding pattern of one’s inner peace.
Our forebears were masters in the practice of compassion. What transformed them and others around them, despite the mayhem of hostilities, was their innate ability to lead a life of balance in the middle of chaos. You’d call such engagement as fusing, or uniting, the divine element with human fortitude. This was their magic wand; a celestial potion that enabled them to overcome personal hardships, while bringing in love, consensus and dignity to their mind, body and soul.
It also laid the groundwork for the word, spirituality, to enter and evolve in everyday life — although it may be stated that power was everything in an age long gone by. Or, rampant wealth and royalty, which were followed by everything else. While spirituality, or building great temples and monuments, was a priority, what also engaged our ancients’ context of life was doing good to fellow folks, who were less fortunate.
It was an era of plenty, or an epoch, not dictated by terse ‘business’ beliefs — as is the case in our age. From office cubicles and meetings to departmental stores, or your local grocer. In other words, spirituality was ‘food for thought’ and vice versa for a majority by their own free will — not through a religious, nay ‘commercial’ guru, with a well-oiled public relations apparatus in tow, as is often the case nowadays. Or, someone who delivers ‘instant solace,’ if not nirvana, to corporate honchos, or the rich and famous.
Let us not, of course, detract from the merits of a handful of good, noble things occurring in our troubled times. Not long ago, there was no lexicon in business, yet there was business in its ‘soul,’ for getting things done for a cause. The prime example being one group that was and is synonymous with business ethics ‘made of steel’ — or, fair play, candour and justice. The word, soul, may be just too much all-pervading with and for a different purpose, in our new millennium, enveloping, for instance, the portals of education, for a price, through means inequitable, or otherwise, including corporate social ‘self-promotional’ responsibility. There is also ‘all-paid-for’ on the spot happiness — a retreat in a ‘mind-body-soul’ resort, or spa, for company executives as a dividend for attending a marketing conclave over the weekend. This lasts so long as the weekend lasts — because, one cannot learn meditation, or yoga, in a two-day encampment.
What does this represent? That the whole idea of spirituality has a uniqueness of its own, with every spiritual experience, old or new. It absorbs our fears like the sponge and drives them out like the mop. This is what our ancients believed readjusted our vision — to make sense of the simplest and/or the most complex of things. Nature, it is rightly said, nurtures this attribute — like honing your skill, or aptitude, at every level.
This occurs because all of us have the key to unlock our minds, trepidations, or anxieties. In other words, we are just as consciously aware of our emotional responses as much as we are keyed to expressing them and our intent — even when the going is tough, or extremely sensitive and minimalist. This is also as good as expressing our love for someone, or managing a subtle, or explosive situation, in day-to-day-life.
