Spend your time in pursuit of excellence

Oasis

As children, we carry simple and small baggage -- mostly related to studies, love to friends and family, some fear, jealousy and so on. The less fortunate among us carry financial burden as well. Whatever the baggage, children carry them without guile, looking forward to better days.

As we get older, however, the baggage becomes heavier -- all the focus, even of formal education, is towards making money, ethical or otherwise, and clouded with numerous diversions. Some of them, as history stands witness, have caused calamities of civilisational proportions. Because, the baggage now includes hatred towards other orders and beliefs, ethnicity, nationality, colour, creed and what have you.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs merits a mention here: Our primary needs are biological in nature -- food and health; this is followed by a vast span of social and emotional needs that go on to culminate in self actualisation -- where one excels oneself and excellence, not worrying about others, is the driving force against all human actions.

Often, we spend a life time trying to compete with others instead of perfecting ourselves like great artists, sportsmen or scientists. Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning says men can climb from half way through social or even the primordial biological needs and get in to the sublime self actualisation level, as he witnessed in his holocaust days under the Nazi Germany. Starving men in concentration camps had given up the last piece of bread to dying men, according to him.

While many of us are blessed to have our biological needs fulfilled, we squander our time in the seemingly unending race to satisfy our social needs, in competition with others. We seldom bother about excelling in our individual pursuits and attach undue importance to wealth or status. Age brings a new dimension to the whole business of what you wish to do with yourself in the limited, and fast receding time, of life or consciousness still left with.

We may have several choices for utilising the rather frugal time left. How best to use it? The easiest, common and compelling one, is to learn not to worry. While many turn to spirituality or altruism. I, for one, like to contemplate and understand what’s space-time, the question which baffles human imagination forever. What is after tomorrow and millions of years before and after and what’s beyond sky and space? If it needs more science, paper and pencil, quite walks, so be it. I shall take it.