Life is a journey where success and failure is understanding the multiplicity of life, with the acceptance of negatives and positives. The realisation of macrocosm and microcosm of life should be the existential aim of achieving viability. However the present societal definitions of life revolve around success and failure of achieving rewards and reposing ourselves in materialistic desires. Fulfilment of life is lying outwards rather than inward. In the quest of gaining knowledge, learning and running behind success we forget to acknowledge the divine beauty present within us. Our society, our education is directing us towards gaining the knowledge of the world without the knowledge of self. “We” live our life, “we” achieve success without “we” being “we”. Finding the inner liberation and freedom should be the Success but we have landed up into the success of competition and achievement, of a status and recognition in society. I agree that to a certain level these (materialistic) things do matter because if you can’t feed your own bodily needs you can’t live but does that mean to live a life directed by others! We grasp the freedom struggle of countries without the freedom of the soul’s will, living in an ugly relationship with life without inner peace of fulfillment and realising our own relationship with our inner peace.
Success in life should be the ability to tackle the situation and welcome failure. Education should be the spontaneous act of achieving self . Nevertheless, we have landed up in a precarious situation where we study mathematics but can’t solve the equation of life, we study science but fail to understand the relationship between the cause and effect of relationships in life,we study education but without the education of self, we study history without knowing our present, we study sociology with the inability to deal with society and the list goes on for every subject of our education curriculum. Enlightenment of self and the basic existential emotions of life are bargained. Success, failure, life and the inner fulfilment all are caged in fixed definitions by society. Harnessing our abilities and freedom of life; giving us the freedom to explore the world in a closed 4 by 4 room. We fail to remember society is made from us, we are not made by society.
The rat race of success and failure has helped in bleeding out the emotions from life. The negligence of emotions from childhood and limiting the child to mere passive followers has drained us. In the pursuit of success, self-perception has been skewed up with our full abilities to fit ourselves in that closed 4 by 4 room with the freedom of an obscure traverse universe. The unacknowledged divine beauty of the ‘little scientist’ goes in vain with each layer of success and failure. Curbing the child in books and discipline with an assumption that till a child is a ‘student’ he/she doesn’t have much knowledge of emotions of the self and the world around and should behave according to the parent’s/society’s wish; is laying deep rooted negative impacts on a child’s social and emotional well being as the natural emotions of children are suppressed according to other’s suitability. It is a fact that no person can ever know another person fully, even if they share everything, something will always remain enveloped between them. So if that’s the case and supposedly even if it’s our very own child, how can we assume that we know each and everything about them and their emotions; if not, who are we to decide their journey of success and failure. More than the physical harm of this another abuse which is covert in nature despite being social is draining as most of the positive energy is oozed out of the body in making others satisfied with us and moulding ourselves according to their wishes and needs. Relationships have become hollowed,with dwindling trust and depths in them and on exaggeration level are somehow the root cause of all crimes persisting in society. More greed of material wealth has taken the place of inner fulfilment and directed it towards the dumping yard, as it is the thing which hardly matters if we have money. Perennial feelings of shame, guilt and self blame have become so strong in life that there lies a sensitivity to or a constant fear of rejection and difficulty in identifying and expressing the emotions. Rampant feelings for attaining perfectionism is another big issue. Feeling of loneliness despite being surrounded by people who care for you has become our permanent companion.
In the age of 21st century skills isn’t it our moral duty to bring a change in ourselves and in our society? We all go through the same phases and even then we bestow the same judgemental notions of success, failure and life to our posterity. We didn’t die in that closed 4 by 4 room, but they would die if we didn’t stop them to aspire the same. It has to be realised that death is not the physical death, real death is death of our soul, our feelings, our freedom and our inner fulfilment.
Sakshi Yadav is pursuing her B.El.Ed. from Gargi College, New Delhi.
