Circle of Life: A Philosophy

Life is an exam, in which every one of us is appearing. In this exam of life, the syllabus is undefined, questions are unknown and answers are abstract. With an unknown syllabus, to an unasked question, with an unsolvable answer we are writing that exam and exit without result. No one succeeds, No one fails. But everyone competes;

When there is no success or failure, why we are competing in life? Why we never get satisfied with what we have. What leads to misery in life?

According to my understanding, we complete a circle,” Circle of life” in our life. Circle has no beginning and end to it. In other words, we can say circle ends at the start point. Similarly, life ends at the beginning point.

This circle of life is drawn over a medium known as time. Like the circle, time also has no beginning and no end, it’s eternal. But when we measure something with time, we make it finite. Conversion of infinite to finite! Absolute to Relative!! The root of competition!!

This circle of life can be run only once. However we run, how big the circle may be, the circle ends in the beginning. We say that we are running to win. But we are running towards nothing, which is the beginning. When there is no absolute goal or destination in life, winning has no meaning. When winning has no meaning in the circle of life, we created meaning for winning in the walk of life. We started competing in an unannounced competition, with an invisible competitor without a frame of rules. It’s similar to that how we could not view the full circle, when we walk over the circle; we can’t realize that the rules of circle of life also.

Adding to that, the circle of life has unalterable past and uncertain future. Once we have crossed a point, we could not come back. It’s a one-way. Also, always future is uncertain in this circle of life. Like how the direction keeps on changing in the circle, the future keeps on changing in the life.

Then, whoever, runs in the circle, wants to make it big? We measure the circumference and the area of the circle and cry loudly that “mine is big”. But we forgot that the ultimate destination is the same for everyone.

Also, this circle of life is written differently by different people. Even though style is different, everyone makes it to a circle. Forgetting the circle, we started naming the styles. We call them by Nation, We call them by religion, and we call them by race. It is like fighting over the hand writing rather than the meaning.

The conversion of absolute to relative doesn’t end with time. It has been extended to all the absolutes like behaviour, appearance, growth, size etc. We started saying good and bad, right and wrong, high and low, Pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow etc. We started conditioning of mind towards one side and started saying this is only right. We adjusted the line according to our convenience and started saying that our life-style, our beliefs, our religion, our identities are greater than others.

Thus, the creation of absolute to relative, failure to draw the bigger picture of life, uncertainty over future leads to miseries of life like competition, fight over others. We can’t escape it. So, let us compete. Life is a misery. Let us live in misery.

--- The above is not an excerpt. But some idea has been drawn from my reading from J.K and SudhaMurthy's.