Rashid Saeed » Life

Complete Life and Incomplete Self

Rashid — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:50:47 +0000

You can get anything doesn’t mean that you can have everything. Life has so much on offer that none can have all of it. Even with unlimited resources, whether financial or social, our unlimited wants don’t seem like being fulfilled. Everything comes with a price tag, price that money alone can’t meet. Its price of emotions, price of resources, price of relations, price of other less important wishes; paid with sacrifice, paid with fears, paid with compromises and paid with money. Sometimes, even when we had all of resources to get something; we can’t get it. How more selfless human could be?

Wishes are like closed doors opening to new doors, each having numerous locks, each requiring number of keys to get opened and each one has keys(to next door) stored in it and nothing else. We keep on collecting keys, keep on opening the doors but never achieve anything, never get satisfied, never get complete. Our only satisfaction is to unlock the door, its sense of success that we get. But it doesn’t last longer, we get attracted to next closed door and yet again we begin collecting keys for the door. Keys are like resources required to un-lock the wishes.

It seems like life keeps on making us fool. It never takes hope away from us. We wish to savor sense of satisfaction beyond every unlocked door. We strive for every wish like it was our last but no-one is. It continues on, till we meet the final door, the death. Perhaps it’s the ultimate sense of completion that we’ve been looking for throughout our life. But how could it be? It’s completion of life, not ours. What have we been striving for? Our destination or that of life? Our completeness or that of life?

Our life and our self are different, entirely different things. Life keeps on driving our self in a way that we feel incomplete just because life’s incomplete. We keep running after life’s wishes and aim for satisfaction of our self, how could it be possible?

A day-long change-meter

Rashid — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:19:34 +0000

Of many factors that contribute to evolving and changing nature of life, “a new day” terminology describes the change in more convincing and comprehensive way. May be it’s because we’ve patronized our life with day-routine, transactions are managed on day-today basis, we hope and strive to make the change turn for better at the end of the day. Simply, a day is a time span taken by change to complete one cycle. According to the time-cycle comprising of 24 hours that we’ve created, a day itself keeps changing all the time. But still, we’ve standardized a day as meter of the change by combining all the changes in 24 hours span in one general change called “day”. This is what leads us to declare each day as a new day. It’s more about the changes that go through all the day that make a day different. Although sometimes a change-span of one day seems much longer to describe a change as it seems to have happened in an eye-blink but still so fat, day-to-day routine has worked best for us.

Image Credits: time.com

Staging the stages of life

Rashid — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:08:06 +0000

There’s one thing about life, they say; that it goes on. To some people, it’s like a roller coaster ride which ends at the moment when you’ve understood what it actually is. Every life is a secret, even to the person living it. A secret that only death can open and at verge of death we come to understand what it was and what it could be. We’re born as a change and die for a change; both are for good. It proves the fact that change is always good. And since life’s good, it has to keep changing and a good living is when you keep up with the change.

I won’t name any of the four stages of life over here, the graphic says it all. One severe fact is that we, humans, are not meant to accept the change. As our life goes on, we seem to have strong wish to go back to previous stage of life. We have to face 4 deaths in our lifespan, one for each stage of life. And soon as we realize that a specific phase is about to end in our life, a wish for a possible reborn gets hold of us. Not because the change was unlikely or unnatural, not because we didn’t like the change but because we didn’t accept the change, because we thought we could live the past to its fullest once we get another chance.

Notice the people, who prevent the change, everyone does of course. As an example, people who dye their hair; they do it not because they didn’t like it getting gray but because they thought they had not yet utilized their black-hair-era. Its natural dissatisfaction that does us lot of good at times and equally bad some other time. We’re perhaps born to be dissatisfied, after all that is what brings all the innovation to this world. It’s strange phenomenon, we don’t accept the change because of dissatisfaction and our dissatisfaction itself is origin of the change. So the things like satisfaction and constant don’t exist here in this world but that doesn’t prevent us from pursuing those.

It’s all natural, isn’t it, the change itself, the reason for change i.e. aging, and unwillingness to accept the change. I wonder if we could ever change it but since I never could, I assume none can. We’ve no control over when we’re born, no control over when we die but have full control over everything in between. That’s only when we could accept what’s constant, i.e. dissatisfaction.

Life of a hope

Rashid — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:04:17 +0000

Let’s hope! It’s perhaps the most common and effective expression of optimism. So effective that; even a pessimist hopes, even we hope against the hope. No matter how severe and challenging the situation is, no matter how impossible it looks to get away from the darkness we’re caught into, the spark of hope always lightens in the pitch black darkness and guides our way to galaxies of possibilities. Although those possibilities are more near to what we call impossible but our hope denies the possibility of the impossible and convinces us to believe that “Impossible is only a word”. Even we may still not achieve that “impossible” but hope keeps us up to fight till the very end. The fight to acquire the impossible drives us away from the ruins of our loss and we define the moment as “well, we fought till the end”.

There’s a premier hope, the hope for life; that keeps us alive. And like with every battle of hope and impossibilities, we fight for life till the very end, knowing that we may not win the battle. However it doesn’t mean that we can never lose hope. Hope is a driving force and like every other force it needs energy. The moment we lose the source(s) of energy, all our hopes seem like fading away which eventually causes a full stop to the life for some people.

Since the hope itself is the essence of hope, a mere loss of hope demolishes other hopes and a new hope gives birth to numerous other hopes. There’s hardly any difference between a hopeless life and a lifeless hope. Both have no vision, no destination and energy. Hope requires as well as emits energy. Energy emitted from hope not only gives us many other hopes but also charges up the life and a charged up life is origin of hopes.

So live a charged up life and hope on guys!

First things first

Rashid — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:18:38 +0000

In a life that never gives you a second chance for a “First Impression”, that constantly tells you to do the “first things first”, it becomes vital to do as many “First things” as you can and make ‘em count, always! First cry, first try, first smile, first touch, first impression, first kiss and .. first love, they all last longer, because they come just once. So virtually every first thing is the last thing as well.

It feels so different, so wonderfully different, to do something for the first time. And you can never get that first feeling again. First things are the happiest part of anyone’s life, some people take it literally and wish (and strive) to go back in time and re-live those happy moments again. But those can never be regained, can only be remembered, since there exists the single “first time”. Pleasure of living is in doing new things rather than repeating the first things you’ve done (and enjoyed doing) in life however it doesn’t take away the pleasure of remembering previous first things. Life’s at it best when you’re doing new things and remembering previous ones.

“Remember the first time we met?” This single line’s been my best tool to resolve any issue, no matter how severe, with any friend. It puts a big smile back on the face and takes us back in the time that can only be remembered.

Get on with it … think of new ways to live the life. Nature helps us with it by blessing us with the gift of aging. The chances of doing new things are always there if we keep up with your age. If we could feel, there’s something new in every new day. Its just that we don’t realize the first things while they’re occuring, mainly because we’re lost in a first thing that once happened for the first time. Not realizing is missing all the privilige the first things have on offer.

Concluding it all, first things are once-in-a-life joys that can only be remembered, can NOT be repeated. It doesn’t end here, every first thing becomes a unique memory, a pleasure for life. So, doing first things first in life helps you getting new memories from old first things every day. But as you enjoy old memories, never miss a new thing that could be a wonderful memory of tomorrow. While every missed first thing becomes a regret and when number of regrets exceeds number of memories … its suicide!