Fly away my beautiful bird
I have been eager to write for quite some time but other activities kept me so busy that I kept losing my trail of thoughts until this morning.
This morning as I look out from my window I can’t stop getting my eyes off these birds who are in a flock just enjoying their flight in the beautiful light blue sky with white cotton candy clouds. They are happily chirping and flying since more than an hour now. I went did a few chores, came back gearing for my meeting which was eventually cancelled but still found them doing the same thing I had left them doing earlier. Going round in circles, then flying high up and coming down, then crossing each other in straight paths, curved paths, each doing their own thing just enjoying their flight. They are so many of them, I tried counting them but I couldn’t keep track.
They are not bound by time, space or goals. They are truly free which we humans somehow are not. We made this convenient modern world for ourselves where we are locked in our own cages, where we just cannot ‘be’ without looking at the clock. We are slaves of time and our own needs, more like greed, our need of expansion keeps us on the move all the time.
I have always felt that if I don’t grow then what the point of life is without even wondering or questioning the need for the growth that I keep seeking. Once our basic survival needs are met why aren’t we satisfied? Why do we want more and more? And because we don’t know what to acquire we keep acquiring whatever physical form of things we can see and touch. But I found myself growing beyond that too and caught up in another cage. There are enough pressures in this modern world to keep us busy.
Once you get beyond acquiring material things, there are people pushing you to look for your ‘purpose’. It has become a big business to help people discover their purpose. And purpose somehow is sold as being something very huge and impactful and most people seem to think their purpose is to change the world. I used to be one of them, not anymore. I don’t think we even understand these games of the modern world. These self- inflicted pressures and cages that we build for ourselves only leave us drained and even more disappointed.
That again leads us to the same question – why are we not free?
Why do we constantly need to become something more than who we are at the moment? Why can’t the purpose of life be ‘freedom’? Freedom from our never ending needs, freedom from worries of the future, freedom from greed.
As if our personal responsibilities aren’t enough we have one more thing to worry about and that is ‘universal responsibility’. When two of my favourite teachers Mo Gawdat and Gabor Mate sat down to talk about the situation in Gaza, Mo said in today’s world we have access to information that only burdens us because we do not have the capacity to do anything to change the situation. Gabor said our responsibility is to ‘not be passive’ and speak up against the wrong happenings. Are these birds speaking up or just being? I guess they do not need to because in the animal kingdom they do not inflict pain for reasons beyond survival. This happens only in the human world, this one that we have created for ourselves.
Being a teacher at heart I have this urge to always share everything that I know and anything new that I learn but I want to do them in ways that do not create any pressure on me. I am always told that if I want my voice to reach the audience I have to be posting on social media every single day; not my cup of tea. Does that mean I am not doing my bit?
But the law of attraction says I just need to be myself, try to be as happy and as rested as I can be, have as much fun as I can but striving to be on social media all the time to get people to listen to me is not my idea of fun. Looks like we have to ‘be’.
Anita Moorjani says our purpose must fulfill ourselves not stress us.
So many teachers, so many different teachings. Which school of thought is right?
I used to write regularly for fun and put up my content on my website for leaving a legacy for anybody who will be seeking answers to life’s journey and might resonate with me. But when I got caught up in making this my profession I stopped enjoying it. I do not want to compete with anybody else so today when I write only for myself I feel free, I switched off my phone and kept pouring my heart. It feels liberating.
I do not think our purpose is meant to be an external affair, it is very much an internal affair and from my understanding I feel that our purpose is only to discover our authentic self and just be. Just be like a flower who doesn’t care about competing with another flower. It spreads its fragrance, takes part in pollination and dies when time comes. We are so caught up in ‘doing’ that even the people pushing us to discover our purpose have made it a ‘doing’ thing not a ‘being’ thing. And that’s exactly the difference between the masculine and the feminine.
The masculine is all about ‘doing’ and the feminine is all about ‘being’. All good comes about by the feminine that is ‘being’ instead of ‘doing’ because when we are in our ‘being’ mode we create. In case you are wondering if the masculine and feminine refers to the male and female gender then no, it is not like that at all. Irrespective of gender, each one of us is made up of the masculine energy and the feminine energy like the yin and yang; balancing the two within us gives the ultimate sense of harmony and fulfillment.
Whenever there is imbalance there is destruction because we lose touch with our inner selves. In today’s world there is so much imbalance because we have made the masculine energy dominant. When the masculine becomes dominant in the world, creation starts to cease, hence it is no surprise that so many women in today’s world find conception difficult. It is nature’s way of showing us that we are going wrong. But humanity does not bother taking a clue from this. Humanity is caught up in their drama of ‘doing’ ‘doing’ and more ‘doing’ and anybody who wants to ‘be’ is labelled as complacent. We are social creatures and want to belong so we get up and continue ‘doing’ mindlessly. It is so ingrained in our existence that we run on auto-pilot to keep doing.
But if we really want to ‘do’ something we must do whatever it takes to discover our authentic selves so that we can ‘be’ and then we will be free of any compulsions driven by the external world. To be free also means to have such high self-worth that we do not need to justify our existence, much like the birds who do not seek validation, neither does any creature in the animal kingdom. This high self-worth can only come from being our true self and becoming free of our egos. It is our egos that keep us entangled in the dramas of the world. The game of increasing subscribers and followers is also designed to keep us in our cages because with true liberation the tech giants will lose control over humanity.
It is high time we realize that we are only lured into believing that we are free to make our own choices when we are not. As long as we are social beings the narrative that is driving humanity will always compel us to ‘do’ what others are doing and while we think we are exercising our choices we are actually just designing and building our cages.
Break free from your cage, fly away my beautiful bird!
Much Love,
Rashmi Yadav
Free Image credit – https://pixabay.com/
