To be or not to be?

Friday nights make me awfully philosophical. While the rest of the world is out beckoning another weekend, I am usually stuck by a window sill staring at infinity. Not that it feels as hollow as it sounds- it’s oddly comforting- but like all moral and philosophical quandaries, it begs the question ‘why’. That’s a self absorbing chain of causality and one that requires opening a lot of dark doors; so I live with it as is. In fact, it is often such a soul sucking vortex of enquiry that little remains apart from the thought itself. It’s some of these remains that I intend the reader to part with today.

What is the true way of life- one of utter involvement or that of reserved detachment, one of rising desires or that of ‘just’ needs, of attachment or resignation, is it uninhibited indulgence or stoic passivism?

Understand that I do not intend to equate indulgence with extravagance nor passivism with renunciation. As strong as the words may be coming across now, the adjectives will hopefully derive a more contextual definition in the ensuing narrative.

Coming across as absolute extremities on the spectrum of choice, it is here- I understand- that you will be tempted to opt for a more practical and reasonable albeit diplomatic and self serving middle path. It is the same with life, something that comes as a result of sentience and free will. But then we’ve all had our Friday nights- moments when we have questioned, rejected, even escaped reality. Times when we have wondered why it had to be that way. These moments often culminate in one such choice between extremes- to hold on or to let go. Live with them a little longer the next time and perhaps you will sense what I am trying to get to, in case you haven’t already. For what it’s worth, try and shed your subjective perspectives that begin with the phrase ‘it depends…’ and then for once we can look at it with the objectivity that is needed.

So we all seek happiness. All of man’s pursuits are essentially attempts to increase what moral philosophers call ‘utility’ or overall happiness of the individual and society. But then there’s grief, regret, pain, anger, lust, greed, despair and frustration.

Why?

We all make mistakes and we all pay a price. However, a whole lot of life’s problems arise out of our incessant pursuits. Everything that we attach ourselves to is either taken away or ends up hurting oneself, eventually. We are all too human to escape that eventuality. For, once we wishfully engross ourselves in such pursuits, we do not quite comprehend when to put them to rest or often worse- what to make out of them. Most of our actions are born out of instincts rather than intelligent thought and therefore, unsurprisingly, most of what we do at any moment turns out to have little or no relevance with where we were some time (a year, month, week or even a day) ago.

Think about it- how often do you give a second (read ‘deep’) thought to how you invest yourself at any given moment, even in seemingly long term endeavours like career and education? Most of our pursuits are laughably incoherent, mutually unrelated and quite embarrassingly directed to an end that bears little or no relevance to any particular intermittent state of reference. In other words, had it not been for some unquestioned custom, misplaced belief, inescapable instruction or accepted ritual, you couldn’t have cared lesser about it or at least thought differently about it. It is almost like jumping over planks floating on a river, with little or no idea as to where the river leads. Perhaps this transience infested with ignorance- not knowing what will be- is the very substance of life. But at times the stark absurdity of such unreasonable pursuits makes my mind rebel. It is such unchecked indulgence that often breeds frustration and despair and it is in this context that I intend to use the word.

The obvious opposite to such an approach to life would be one of reservation. It makes perfect sense to utilize the mental faculties that put us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom- the ability to reason and rationalize- in order to distance oneself from self deprecating endeavours. Abstaining yourself from emotional investments seems the better way of ensuring you do not allow anything or anyone the power or liberty to affect you in a way that disturbs this overall happiness- peace of mind, so to say. So, although you live in the realm of the senses in a world of distractions that is constantly trying to sway you all across between states of absolute bliss and consuming grief, you resist. It is a cold, measured, mechanical and inherently self serving way of existence but it is also pure- unadulterated by swathes of those inexplicable and apparently insurmountable momentary impulses that arise out of nowhere and strive to distance you from this individual state of neutrality. 

This course of reason will, however, often push you to make choices you do not want to make. Choices that will strive to distance you from your most intimate beliefs and confront you with the darkest of emotions. It forces you to examine the warmth of human experiences from the cold and unforgiving lens of rationality. Things like morality, spirituality, humanity and love get convoluted and tend to assume disturbing proportions if you try to unravel them in this light.

So what do we all do?

We simply choose to go by what we have been taught or told. We use the society as a metric to judge what it is that we are supposed to do, something that will be acceptable, unquestionable, comfortable, manageable. We choose to blindly conform to an abstract code which was made up by people no less clueless about things than ourselves. And reason is often looked down upon by those who found its fruits too hard to live with. It is abhorred for challenging beliefs, murdering faith and above all for infesting sacred human emotions with the ‘scourge of rationality’.

So we act, we smile, we get along and then when there’s time (read ‘Friday nights’) we go back to resenting anything that will make us feel warm inside again, make us feel good about ourselves, about those choices that we think we made. It’s a vicious cycle this, one that leaves us more broken in ways that can never be undone.

True- it is both the ability to reason and the ability to empathize that makes us human. These faculties have been defined and refined through ages and put our race at the very top of this world and from what little we know- the universe. However, the ease with which we keep switching between these behavioral extremes just to serve our own petty ends, to me seems hypocritical, even narcissistic. Why should any one of these often mutually conflicting ways of life be chosen over the other? And yet we conveniently go about doing the same, eternally torn between possibilities.

I think there’s no heaven or hell, that whatever they mean is already all around us, elegantly hidden in the enormous bounties of the world. That we are all made capable of doing great good and great bad in a universe that has a blatant disregard for both. It existed just fine long before there was any point and it will continue to do so long after all of this will cease to matter. However, this universe also has an incomprehensibly strange sense of humor- it mischievously dropped carbon based sentient life forms with a mind and a heart (who somehow developed a huge sense of self importance) somewhere in an infinitely small portion of itself just to see what could happen in between!

So- to think or to feel, THAT is the question…

Dangerous Knowledge

I think we all “grow up” when we realize that people don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean, it’s when we start figuring out what people actually mean when they say something.

Growing up takes time. It doesn’t strike you as a blessing on a Sunday afternoon. It is a process that may take years, decades or even an entire lifetime. It can also be viewed as an evolutionary or a neuro-biological phenomenon that is accrued vastly from the sum total of the experiences of one generation, an ideology or world view that they deem worthy of passing on to the next to ensure the prosperity of their lineage.

It is a discovery, a sense of realisation, of knowing something you didn’t a moment ago. The knowledge that comes with it is a quintessential part of human experience. It happens because we are the only species who have an infinite capacity to learn from other’s experiences. It comes at a price that must be paid with innocence. You lose the ability to seek goodness in everything and everyone, or at best learn to exercise it with ever increasing caution.

It cannot be undone, not in its entirety at least. As it is with science, theories you build once will always be under revision in the light of new observations and experiences, as and when you gain the ability to examine the world with more and more sophisticated tools- education. This knowledge does broaden your world view but while doing so it also confronts you with those infinite shades of grey that will forever cloud the ever expanding gulf between black and white.

It makes you question your understanding of faith and trust, making you a lifelong skeptic. You start constructing an invisible guard that you will now wield for the rest of your life, anxiously waiting, searching for people who can patiently, lovingly invade those numerous impregnable walls and manage to get close enough to wield that guard for you, with you. The walls keep getting higher and stronger each time someone fails to do so or surrenders in between.

It is magical how most of life is about sharing human experiences and knowledge but it is a pity how most of growing up is about understanding the perils of the same. I used to find it very ironic how everyone always wanted to be happy- to the extent that they would even be willing to play along with their own overtly pretentious social exercises like gatherings, festivities and celebrations, just to bath in the aura of collective goodness- but still, somehow, eventually end up more bitter and miserable than ever before. After all, why must there be anger, grief, regret, envy and suffering in a world where everyone wants to be happy?

I now realize it’s because of the pleasant delusion that is hope, that no matter how bad things get, we can always choose to believe that they can get better. This belief, although entirely self sufficient and independent of the dangerous knowledge, it seems comes much more conveniently to those who know less. May be it is just a part of the bliss that comes with ignorance but the one thing I have realized “growing up” is that when the long night comes, it is much easier to keep moving along when you do not know what kind of demons stand lurking in the dark.

Thought for the Day

Nothing kills a man more patiently and painfully than having to live with being someone, with a constant realisation that he could have been so much more.

Be it the valiant soldier smothered by guilt, who had fought with everything he had but still spends hours evaluating alternate MOs that could have saved his partner. Or the passionate sportsman kicking himself for the rest of his life, calculating where he could have squeezed in that extra millisecond in the deciding moments of that unfortunate final. The helpless man who struggles towards the end of every month, wondering how he can be a better parent, husband and provider. OR the hopeless romantic trying to make sense out of his first brush with infatuation, ruminating why he can be everything he must be, except the man that he wants to be with the girl.

It is difficult beyond reason, the feeling- an all consuming cocktail of regret, anger, despair and guilt- is too much for anyone to live with. There are moments of utter weakness, when you want to submit to the chaos. There are moments of undying despair, where each passing second is a striking reminder of who you are, and much more importantly- who you are not, who you can never be. There are moments of utter madness, where you are willing to trade every last bit of happiness that remain in this God forsaken life of yours for one more try. It pains even more to realize, eventually, how misplaced and irrational the attempts were in the first place.

It does not lie anywhere near your realms of control. Despite all your strength or wisdom, there is nothing you can do to “fix this”. It is like falling in a bottomless pit. It invades your deepest, darkest recesses, places you weren’t even aware existed inside you. It breaks your pride while relentlessly staring at you straight in the eye, proving conclusively beyond doubt that compared to this, wounds that heal themselves are like blessings of physical pain, for the most permanent of scars always lie within.

Sometimes life will spare you to wander amidst possibilities and search for that one tentative link somewhere among the terribly mangled chains of causality that could offer you some sign of hope for a change in circumstances. It is made worse by the following swathes of self loathing. The irony of it breaks you when you realize you have irrevocably been a part of something that can never be undone, in a universe that boasts of its eternal penchant for change.

The presence of that individual is a constant reminder of how you are forever doomed to be just a worthless fraction of what you could have been. There is little escape from this. Those who manage to do so emerge stronger, wiser men who have now lost faith in some (or many) institution(s) held dear to mankind. They are men who manage a silent laugh when people talk about destiny and how good things are always meant to be.

Pain has its own way of teaching you some of life’s most invaluable lessons. It poisons you day in and day out. It changes you in ways that cannot be undone. It makes you stronger, immunizes you for other far worse forms of suffering. You aren’t really better or worse, just someone you never were before, damaged in ways that will never be known to those even closest to you- veiled by smiles and laughs that will always hide much more than they will reveal.

Most of life is having to choose between holding on and letting go. Anything in between is dishonesty, hypocrisy and an ugly compromise. They say time changes everything. It is a lie. Time merely pushes things further into the past, rendering an illusion of change. Choices change things. They are not always nice but they are necessary and you must let go of something in order to move on to something else.

I have always believed that there are no things that are best left unsaid. But there are some that are best left written- words have a kind of indelible permanency which life so does not possess.

The Triumph of Reason

We all go about our daily lives indifferent to the marvel that is life. Studies suggest that based on the initial and boundary conditions of our universe, the odds of intelligent life arising on planet Earth are lower than that of an enormous pile of waste in a junk yard arranging itself to assemble into a Boeing 747! Every once in a while though, some brilliant minds come along and change the way we look at the universe, forever.

Although science was progressing by leaps and bounds under the light of new theories (Quantum Mechanics) and discoveries (elementary particles) in the early part of the 20^th century, we had somehow grown too comfortable with- and hence ignorant of- the most pervasive of all natural forces- gravity. Perhaps it was because of the larger than life image of Isaac Newton, scientific community at large was of the opinion that gravity was understood in its entirety. Proposing that the force which makes an apple fall and the force which keeps planets in motion around the sun are essentially the same was unarguably his life’s work and one of the most elegant ideas of all time.

Albert Einstein was a little known clerk working in a Swiss patent office. Surfing through all the path breaking discoveries during his day job, he realized that although we could measure this force with great accuracy, it was quite embarrassing that we had no idea as to HOW it actually works. How is it that the sun grabs hold of the earth across vast empty space, eternally confining it in a periodic motion around itself?

In 1905, after publishing his work on Brownian motion, photoelectric effect and what we now recognize as the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein decided to go after this missing piece of the puzzle, something which had apparently eluded even the father of gravity himself. It took him 10 years to perfect the math that would go into the most beautiful idea of all time- the theory of General Relativity.

Einstein blew everyone away by suggesting that gravity isn’t really a force and that time was the 4^th dimension of our universe. Put together with the known 3, it stitches the entire universe together in a 4 dimensional spacetime continuum. Everything exists and happens in the spacetime continuum. Anything that has mass curves spacetime causing objects in its vicinity to move in a predictable manner. Instead of being a property of a body, gravity is in fact a property of the universe itself. Any mass curves spacetime and curved spacetime tells mass how to move!

A 2D representation of spacetime continuum- the relativistic view of gravity.

From time travel to worm holes, this simple idea has had ground breaking implications. It completely changed our understanding of time and the universe at large. Since 1915/16, it has been verified by countless experiments and observations with far greater precision than that produced by Newton’s theory of gravity. One such implication was the existence of gravitational waves.

Much like electromagnetic waves which could transmit radiation (the only other force understood at that time), Einstein posited the existence of gravitational waves. He proposed that when two heavy objects (like super massive black holes or stars) interact, gravitational waves would be generated. These waves, not much unlike ripples in a pond, would travel unobstructed throughout spacetime at the speed of light. However, unlike visible part of the EM spectrum, they would not just be invisible but also too weak to be detected. This was until now.

On 11^th February 2016, a team of scientists working at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Waves Observatory) in USA confirmed the existence of these waves nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein had first theorized about their existence. They did this by stationing two laser beam apparatuses 3000 miles apart. These 8 km long ‘L’ shaped apparatuses fired laser beams and recorded an interference pattern at the moment of impact. Under the influence of gravitational waves coming from a distant binary star system (two super massive stars slowly collapsing into each other and losing energy by the emission of gravitational waves), these 2 observatories recorded a characteristic shift in their patterns (much like ripples on water cause a cork to bob up and down, only here the disturbance is in fractions of atomic diameter) which was matched at the two laboratories and confirmed.

A schematic representation of the LIGO observatory.

LIGO scientists estimated that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second—with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. The detector in Louisiana had recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the one in Washington. Scientists are now advancing on to Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)- a space based gravitational wave detector to repeat the experiment far away from earthly disturbances.

There are infinite human endeavours but none other quite captures my imagination as the pursuit of truth, the undying efforts of a lone race trying to make sense of a world no less magical than any of our imaginations. It is an endless quest that often breaches the realms of science, venturing into the philosophical, fiddling with the theological and at times- evoking the metaphysical. Its enormous mysteries give purpose to our existence, for even in my thoughts; I dread the day we all come to know all that is worth knowing.

It is the purest and sincerest curiosity, unadulterated by arrogance or authority, for everyone at some time in our lives would have found ourselves gazing at the horizon, questioning how it all came to be. In case you haven’t, take an evening out of your hurried lives, lay back on your arm chair, look up at the night sky and wonder how, wonder why. If you are calm and it is quiet enough, you will be humbled by the sheer vastness of it. The insignificance of your troubles and worries, the utter foolishness of war and violence, everyone you've ever loved, everyone who has ever lived, everything that we have done to this world- all meager inconsequential happenings on a pale blue dot going around a little known star lying in a trivial corner of one among billions of galaxies...

We are all miracles in a wonderland walking through our lives searching for magic.