This Too Shall Pass
When Life itself is impermanent and uncertain, why do we look for or expect longevity in its components? Our attitudes, relationships, workplace dynamics, health, youth….name one aspect of our lives and we will find people fretting that it is not the way it used to be. There is a also a positive side to this fleeting nature of things. It does not discriminate between feel good and feel bed events / circumstances.
One of the most valuable lessons I have learnt from Life:
This too shall pass.
A dictum anyone can understand. A statement that needs no weighty evidence to support. We see it all the time. Regardless of how old or young we may be, if you can read this, you have experienced it.
The joy of winning a football match in our childhood is replaced by the anguish of silly mistakes made in the test papers. A broken heart from an unsuccessful romance gets patched up pronto with fresh possibilities when the doe eyed girl moves in next door. At work the pressure and frustration of meeting deadlines during year endings are soon forgotten when a Thank you from the big boss lands up in the email inbox.
And there can be so many more examples from each of our lives. So I come back to the question: why do we not learn from this? As is natural, it is more difficult for us to accept and handle the negative consequences of events. The positive ones are ours by right, anyway!
I think it helps to re-visit this principle from time to time. Re-looking and re-acquainting oneself helps to moderate the extremes of emotional lows, making them easier to bear.
But I must confess, it is easier said than done. Maa has just passed away after a long illness and I was with her all almost the time for the last 6 months. Though I know that the depression and pain and the feeling that I failed her will become more and more distant and manageable with time, it is difficult when feelings hover on the surface of our sensitivities, ready to get triggered “on tap” as it were: a conversation, a thought, a picture, whatever, wherever.
Like yesterday at the Gurdwara; the raagi was singing a keertan. I have no idea what the association was, maybe it was the serenity of the place, or an environment where no one would interrupt my thought process, or it was about God’s words in the song. The tears kept flowing as I relived the last few days I spent with maa. I was just so very sad that she went away when she did.
This too shall pass, I remind myself again and again. What I have learnt is that the time it takes for ‘this’ to pass depends upon the intensity of the emotion, and the degree of our involvement: mental/physical or in terms of time with the event. I was sad when my father passed away. But it happened all of a sudden. He was here one day and gone the next. There was no build-up of tension, of expectations of whether he will live or die, he just went. So, while I was sad, I was not depressed for so long the way I am now that my mother has gone.
I suppose it also depends upon the impact it has on our lives, even if there is no build-up of tensions or expectations over a period of time. If a family is devastated by a natural phenomenon such as floods or earthquakes and rendered homeless and without jobs, the degree of involvement with the consequence is high, the time it took for the event to take place, short. Yet, the ‘this’ here will take very long to pass.
So I suppose the above two aspects will determine how long it takes. But it will be always good to remember that ‘pass it will’. Take solace and strength from that knowledge and use that strength to handle the pain. This too shall pass.
