Let me tell you a story. Once there was a farmer in a village. He had a horse which ran away one day. So his neighbor came and said, it is so bad that you lost your only horse. The farmer said ‘maybe’. The next day his horse returned and along with it came 3 more wild horses. The neighbor came and said you are so lucky that now you have 3 more horses. The farmer said ‘maybe’. Next day his son was trying to tame one of the wild horses and fell down and broke his leg. The neighbor came again and said it is so sad your son broke his leg. The farmer said ‘maybe’. The next day the local military people came to the village to take new recruits and felt his son due to broken leg. The neighbor came and said you are so lucky your son got exempted due to broken leg. The farmer said ‘maybe’.
It is a common nature among us to be very thoughtful about the consequences of things we do or things that is happening around us which might affect us. We have our pre programmed mindset to decide whatever that is happening is good or bad. Then we get happy or depressed about that incident. This causes a lot of heart burn as we get sad when something bad happens. We curse ourselves and the whole world that why I am the one facing difficult times. We are programmed to think that only good things will bring more good things and bad things will bring more bad things. But life is not always like that. Life doesn’t work like a mathematical equation because too many variables are there in life.
This brings to my mind another point and that is life in itself is purposeless. It is we who assign purpose to it and when we fail then we feel as if we have failed in life. The complete nature functions on the principle of purposelessness. It is quite difficult to accept this fact as we have been programmed to think otherwise. We compare purposelessness with uselessness, as if there is not future and life is a waste.
Have you thought that why we need break from our so called purposeful life. It is because we look for purposelessness. When we go on a holiday we want to relax and keep our mind off from the grind we have in our purposeful life. In other words we are looking for a few days of purposelessness. With no particular purpose in mind we walk along the beach in sunset, or walk along the mountain tracks with no specific destination. When a musician makes notes it is not for a purpose but it is just a outlet of his creativity and that it makes him happy. There is no other inherent purpose of it. Likewise is the case of a painter. What purpose does the waves have when one after another crashes into the shore without any break. We look at the world from the eyes of a creator, thinking that we create something therefore it need to have a purpose, as an engineer thinks that he will build a building for a particular purpose.
Do you think that the purpose of an apple on a tree is that it is meant to be eaten by humans or birds? The apple grows because it is made that way and not with the purpose that it has to be eaten by us. If there were no apples in this world then the world would not have been something different. Wheat grows not to feed us, it just grows naturally. It is us which use it as a food source. So it is we who are assigning a purpose to it and not the wheat.
We have been brought up with the mindset that we need purpose for everything in life, but actually nature has created life without any purpose. We are the most intelligent being on this planet so we cannot stop ourselves from thinking about purpose of everything. Most of our life also goes by without fulfilling any higher purpose just as one in a billion people. But we feel happy with the small purposes which we create ourselves and achieving those.
If you ask the farmer if life has a purpose, he would reply maybe, maybe not.
Thank you Telesfor sir.