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In Search of the Quiet Life: Part I

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“Well I have been searching
All of my days
Many a road, you know
I’ve been walking on
All of my days
And I’ve been trying to find
What’s been in my mind
As the days keep turning into night … “

– All My Days by Alexi Murdoch

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Tranquility. Ah, doesn’t the word by itself pass a shiver through our spine? If it doesn’t, it should at least make you have goosebumps for a small while which will eventually make you wonder, why is something about such a thing as nothing so special?

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Life, isn’t it too mysterious for us to contemplate, at least in detail? Well yeah, you could give the odd explanation of going up the ladder or from place to place and so on, but it’s a thought that has struck me about how almost everyone would have at some point of time in their life thought about what life, besides what the society has put in place, expects of us.

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Aren’t we all pretty tired of the fake, highly egoistic, less loving, materialistic chaps whom we see in our daily lives? Or oops, am I referring to you and me? All said and done, it is one thing to see a lot of negativity around us and it is another to express it on our own, either originally or as a mirror and of course at the end of it, if we have a good heart, which most men don’t, have deep regrets about our behavior.

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A slight deviation into a psychological lesson
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The psychology here is that we often find out and accuse highly egoistic people, very easily of course because we ourselves are to a huge extent wicked. Our natures are directed towards a selfish existence so much so that we often don’t care about whom we offend in our path. So, was Jesus Christ, the one whom many people accept as the Son of God, wicked because he criticized a whole bunch of crooked chaps at the top? Well, that’s where psychology, and even philosophy very often, takes a very sensitive turn and offends us by not giving a straightforward way out.

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The genuineness of our criticism is to be tested above all and though I am not a person who would ask anyone ‘not to judge’ because of divine consequences (because I don’t think Christ said it in that context either), we must be careful before we judge. In that, we must take our time, look at multiple instances, observe minor and major fluctuations in behavior and then conclude that a pattern has been established, which is inevitably not going to be broken.

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And guess what? The judgment doesn’t end without us having to, even after judging, carefully observing if there is a change and/or repentance and nothing can make you feel more genuinely divine than, taking back the judgment you made because you saw a repentant nature. Any reason why this is true? Cause, you, out of all the unloving, hateful, selfish, and finger-pointing crooks on earth, cared to stop by and revert with an act of divinity. You cared to look back and say, ‘Ah, you indeed have changed’.

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To live and die, and above all, if possible, live on, in tranquility
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It’s isn’t correct that everyone who wins the rat race is still a rat, as quoted by some person I wish I knew who. Only in the eyes of the other rats that didn’t win is the winner a rat cause they know, see, feel, or understand no better. Every now and then, the participants of races we participate in are giants, not ones with a physical demeanor that is intimidating, but with whose mental maturity, we are floored. Again, a rat race ends and those winners who remain rats, die but we must remember that many winners and even participants of such rat races live on, at least as a legend, through their feat, words, and so on.

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The again ‘selfish’ quest
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There are two kinds of people who go in search of a very, very, very, ah, a soothing, quiet life. One, those who are already experiencing it to a huge extent owing to the way they were brought up – in peace, quietness, and harmony because they know that there is something quieter than they have experienced and that their noisy neighborhoods can never provide them the wonderful ambiance that they are enjoying. And the other, who are absolutely traumatized by what they experience through their nagging counterparts.

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In all of this, it is only normal for us to be accused of being selfish for running away from the busyness because of what the society expects from us as an entity that aided us to get to where we are, but as long as we know that we aren’t offending the society’s ways, we can be rest assured of our decision.

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Of course, in both cases, we do have people who take the alter way by going in search of a noisier way of living because of the treasures it has to offer. But perhaps the more mature ones are those who have realized that no matter how pricey the treasures up on offer on the other side are, our souls can never be satiated with it.

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A good comparison of quests
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This phenomenon is specifically comparable when we take the case of any war that takes place as we live. There is one bunch of people who live in a place where the war isn’t happening and have no intention of peeping into the issues that the restless are involved in. And, there is another who run away from such zones fearing intimidations being thrust upon them. As in the above case, there are going to be deviations but the general tendency is such.

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Coming to the quietness, above all
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A walk along the leafy walls of a house on a wet day, a cycling session on a road as broad as a football ground with a very few fellow-riders when the sky is dark or perhaps a hiking exercise with no one along to a greeny mountain after the clouds decided to take a break, are all instances of absolute silence that we experience every now and then in our busy lives. But, oh lovely soul, what if we experienced this every day? What if this was our way of life? And perhaps, what if this was meant to be our way of life, haha.

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A question that we would certainly have at this juncture is, what if we got bored of such a lifestyle too? And, to be reasonable, it is very much possible and hence what we could most certainly try, right from today, would be to take breaks such as these to ensure that we don’t miss out on the beauty that tranquility can provide us.

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Life, love, peace, joy, happiness, excitement, and so on are all subjective terms. Amidst the subjectivity, let us hope to enjoy and not be pulled into the mess that people want to put us into because of where they are already in.

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This quest will continue …

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