Accepting life as it unfurls, with its ebbs and flows

By Suvir Saran
New Delhi [India], July 12 : We humans are quick to accept, embrace, celebrate, cherish, and hold dear something positive and good when it comes our way. We even go further and share that happenstance with near and dear ones and just about anyone willing to give us an audience. But for us to appreciate and understand that which is a positive emotion we must also appreciate and understand the flip side of that same coin. Doing so makes us better recognize, respect, and hold dear those positive happenings in our lives.
Why then are we broken and out of sorts when faced with vicissitudes, challenges, defeats, derailments, ailments, heartbreaks, losses, and failures? Does such dispiritedness come from the depths of our thinking mind and conscientious heart, or is it the knee-jerk reaction of our entitled brain driven by senseless ego and immaturity of human introspection? Can a human easily catapulted by the smallest positives into passionate and unprecedented euphoria not find it in that same heart, mind, and brain to channel their reactions better?
Instead of fragmenting ourselves into inconsolable bits and bobs of grave dysphoria, can we not utilize the strength gained from the positives to tide us over to newly pleasurable and emotionally fulfilling times?
Having just come out of Pride Month, where the rainbow sea of humanity, human identities, gender preferences, and our spousal choices for loving and sexuality are celebrated, I find myself questioning why we humans can defend plurality with gusto and fight for diversity with pride, yet when it comes to the ups and downs of life, choose a lack of diversity and err on the side of total unacceptance of multiplicity.
In not challenging our elasticity of being, in ignoring the lifetime of lessons gleaned every time we are faced with what we consider dire and dark, in ignoring our past struggles and their turning into victories, better outcomes and new beginnings, what is it that we are wanting to achieve?
Life lives and learns, meanders, leaps onto new beginnings, rides and navigates new territories, detours and discovers, and sails into storms that lead to calmer tomorrows, growing from strength to strength. It is richer today for what it traversed yesterday, never pausing to take stock of what was. It is living and breathing, functioning and ticking. When it stops, so too shall the world, and all beings with life that inhabit it.
When I arrived in Manhattan at the age of 20, I was exposed to road rage for the first time. I was baffled by the anger that family, friends, cab drivers and others on the road displayed and meted out without seeming to care how their utterances were impacting the universe. Nary a thought invested in how their lives would be marred by this energy. Thirty years later I have come back home to India, where such anger while driving has now become commonplace.
What brings forth such negative reactions - these outbursts that make us sweat, raise our blood pressure, make us palpitate most unpleasantly, take on nasty personas, and become broken beyond measure? They are brought on by something as transient as someone passing who might have driven by too fast or too slowly, have honked or not, turned on an indicator or forgotten to do so. Or by simply getting stuck in a traffic jam, a reality that emotional outbursts cannot change.
Where are these pangs of anxiety coming from? Do they have real roots in the moments spent driving, or are they reflections of angst pent up deep inside us from times past that have never been addressed? Are they telling of a societal acceptance of rage and aggression?
As I worked in the US and met with family and friends there, I found myself coming of age around people who often showed minimal gratitude and sought maximum pleasure. At too many gatherings I heard mostly that which was negative. There was little reference made to the myriad blessings life had bestowed on them. The glass half empty found all attention, and the glass half full was a forgotten benediction, one that was never celebrated as a felicity or manna.
Emotional pain turned into soul-breaking suffering by the entitled and blessed - this is something that has fascinated me and confounded me since age 35. It has taken a good fifteen years for me to mature my mind's thought processes into seeing life as I lived it, through its disadvantages and benefits, with objective clarity. Even as I was cheated in business dealings, I was taken advantage of by neighbors in our farming community, as I was racially profiled or singled out in small-town America, I started appreciating the life I lived and its abundance of good fortune.
How lucky I have been to have had my mother as both a parent and guide. Through nearly four decades of Vedantic studies, she has gained tutelage that makes her one with the other and in doing so, also with self. It has also made her into a person who is most gracefully accepting of all the challenges that life and the living connected to her, close or distant, have thrown her way. Without ever breaking down, showing a frown, having a hissy fit, or lamenting any given moment, she tackles the worst life can send with the most elegant welcome of acceptance. In embracing wholeheartedly what she is assaulted by, she is most mindfully present in tackling and facing the situation and task at hand with utmost clarity of thoughtful action and reaction.
Mom has taught me through her peerlessly strong expression of moral strength and fortitude. Her expressive face and look furthers the constancy and courageous readiness with which she tackles life and its harsher moments. I have often wondered if her facial expressions that are void of angst and are perennially shining with cool lunar calm help her to stand up with unsurpassable grit against every blow dealt to her. She is the nonpareil of a person ready to tackle life as it comes and to celebrate the ups as calmly as the downs. In softening her exterior demeanour, she manages to cool and tame the outbursts of scattered and broken emotions inside.
For years I watched mom bring a smile to every moment spent caring for my dadi who lived through Alzheimer's for over a decade. She was a pillar of graceful visionary strength as she cared for papa for a decade and a half through the many faces and phases of his illness. I have flashbacks of a time when both my grandparents, papa, baba, panditji, and all three of us kids were sick with high fevers.
I remember mom's stoic manner, her ready smile, and her empathetic nursing skills that brought each of us back to good health. In between dealing with our many challenges, she found fleeting moments of healing and downplaying her own bout of the same virus that left the rest of us complaining bitterly and bedridden. In my mom, I see a living example of how within us, in our own thinking minds, ticking hearts, and feeling brains, lie the vexing answers and ways forward that can give us peace of mind when we need it the most.
Mom always reminds me that accepting life as it unfurls, with its ebbs and flows, is a lifelong journey of acceptance of the most basic truth: we are but a little blimp in the larger world that life is living and carrying forward.
The sooner we accept our impotency in changing most circumstances that confound us the sooner we can begin living lives with happier outcomes.
In our accepting things for what they are, we find the freedom to live and grow. In turning our minds from a fight or flight mode to one of accept and embrace, we declutter our minds, and in that instant, we become one with self, in sync with the world, and freer than free from uselessness cluttering our minds. We start living in peace, feeling at home in and with our mind, body, and soul.
Disclaimer: The author of this opinion article is Suvir Saran, who is a Chef, Author, World Traveler.