Three Phases Of Life

Imagine this: You are standing on a strong wooden plank floating on a silent sea.You feel and look like a braveheart. Your face is against the shore and you are marching ahead like a warier, ready to encounter any obstacle which could come along the way. In the name of preparation, you only have one thing : yourself. Surprised? Where are the life saving equipment like rope, paddle, wet suit, yacht?

You know what this was?

Your and My life.

We are sent here unprepared and unfit for the upcoming challenges. What we have with us are the muscles in our body including physical muscles used for the actual strength and other intangible muscles like willpower and resilience. We ought to build that slowly and steadily after every challenge.

Lets go back to our little imagination. Shall we?

The water starts to get a bit rocky but you are still standing strong. But the the wind becomes too powerful and its difficult to stand then you sit on the plank. You hold on tight to the sides of the world you have right now in front of you. You survive but at times, the waves become real strong for you to even hold on to the wooden plan and you fall into the violent sea, you gasp for air, you move your hands as quickly as you can to come above water. You finally come up and take one deep breath but it hits you again – BAMM and you fall deep into the ocean and you instinctively know that no one can help you but you and hence you exert whatever you have and swim as hard as you can and finally you reach the top.

If you see closely then you will see a pattern here. The different phases we encounter in life:

1. State of undoubtable optimism
2. Losing all hopes
3. Moment of absolute stillness

We all walk through this life in either one of these phases so much so that most of us oscillate between these several times in one single day. You are familiar with the feeling? Mostly we remain in optimism or no hope. But third but most important aspect of any change could be this moment when we are in this stage of neither being in not out. When we do not know what decision could lead us where and right at that time you would feel that its best to just experience the level of stillness within and wait for the time to showcase what has to happen next.

I feel that we never lose hope when we actually loose something. We almost always start to loose hope way before something bad happens. We loose the hope in anticipation of a upcoming dangerous sea wave. But the moment we are hit by the wave and God forbid we fall deep into the enormous ocean, then its almost impossible to loose hope. Really?

Yes, think for yourself. When you failed miserably even after trying hard to hold on to the plank and you are falling down and down then your brain will not work on staying in hopeless mode. It will react to the situation with utmost inner strength which you yourself would not have figured out yet.

Then my final phase comes. You come up and you sit on the plank. For 10 minutes you feel blessed and extremely happy to be alive but once that feeling wears off, comes the moment of stillness. I like to call it the moment of reflection.

What do you think?