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“The end result of your life here on earth will
always be the sum total of the choices you made while you were here.” said a wise soul driving home the importance
of making the right choices in life.
Do we really give importance to the choices we make in our everyday
lives or do we just function on automatic pilot? Aren’t most of our choices
motivated by our conditioning, our belief systems and by what the people will
think?
While times are changing now and we see youngsters making enlightened
choices and ‘following their heart’ and while society is becoming more open and
appreciative of it’s youth experimenting when it comes to career choices, the
scene was quite different just a few years back. 26 year old Ratan who had a
dream, bears testimony to this. His is a story that was oft repeated, (unfortunately
sometimes even today ) in many families.
A child interested in music he had a dream of going to the Musicians Institute
in USA to pursue his dream. His parents however gave him no choice .
“Snap out of it and get real!” was their dictum and they kindly added
“We are doing it for your sake. You need to survive in the real world and earn
your bread and butter, you know. Your father is a doctor and you need to take
over and manage his clinic.”
The poor boy was talked into thinking he was selfish to pursue his
dream. Recently I met his mother at a social gathering and she remarked. ‘How
lucky it is that Rattan followed our advice . See how successful he is today.”
Looking at the smart young man who seemed to have it all, I couldnot help
feeling that behind the successful exterior
something was missing.
Do you have the right to influence your child’s choice, using any means
be it coercing or persuasion or manipulation or emotional blackmail? When God
himself has given us freewill, who are we to tamper with other’s lives? Are we
doing the right thing then by imposing our dreams and choices on our children
and other loved ones and snuffing out
their right to exercise their own choices?
When your life is a tapestry made up of other people’s choices, two
things happen. You end up feeling a victim. You blame fate and if things don’t
work out you can happily blame the
people responsible for your choice. You naturally think that since they have
messed up your life it is up to them to sort it out. Here the need to be
responsible and accountable for one’s own life fades away and people tend to
turn outward for solutions to your life situations.
I have always admired the way in which my friend Kavitha brought up her
daughter Komal. I was surprised to see
that the child was taught to weigh the pros and cons of any decision she took
very early in life. It could be a simple thing as how many chocolates she could
eat.
“I told her that she could make her own decisions but I also pointed out
that each decision came with a consequence. As early as seven she realized that
she had the freewill to eat as many chocolates as she wanted but she also was told
that the consequence of this could be a host of health problems. We would
always advise her as to which was the wiser choice . But the final decision was
hers. I remember the day she gorged on cake one Sunday in spite of repeated
reminders of its consequence. The next day she was down with severe indigestion
and had to miss her friend’s birthday party! That experience taught her a
lesson no amount of nagging could have.
The real problem with choices however started when she became a
teenager.
It was then that I realized that allowing one you loved dearly to
experiment with her choices was a very tough thing to do. It needs us to have
great faith in a higher power to take care of them.
The world today offers our children much more in every aspect of life
than it used to do in our times. From the number of channels on the television
to the number of career option to the number of things they are exposed through
through media and the internet ,even the most level head ones do tend be
confused as to how best to use their time and energy. Komal did bungle up once
or twice as she refused to take our advice and made foolhardy choices
especially in her choice of friends and how she spent her time. But every time
she fell, we were there to help her get up and dust herself back on to the
cycle of life .The result? By the time she was twenty she had a wise head on
her shoulders. By the trial and error
method of making her own decisions and being accountable for them ,she bloomed into living life on her own terms and
learnt the art of making right decisions.
Truly there is no greater teacher than experience in learning the art of making
right decisions, in developing the ability to identify when to take a risk that
will pay off and when to avoid foolhardy decisions.
Ironically Komal was there at the same social gathering I mentioned
above and I could not help comparing the joy this young woman exuded .I
realized suddenly that while both she and Ratan had made it big in their life
the missing element in Ratan was that sparkle of life that was so obvious in
Komal. That was because he was not living his own life. He was living a life
someone else had designed. Komal had developed her will power and her planning
abilities but Ratan who had buried his passion by allowing himself to be swayed
and influenced by others,now needed to rely on others in making any momentous
decision.
“ But surely we owe it to our
children to show them the way.” I asked
Komal’s mother over dinner.
“There you have it” she replied. “That’s all you should confine yourself
to doing-showing them the way. Remember Khalil Gibran’s famous lines ,
‘Your children are not your children. They are
sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you…”
Our children are not our possessions to influence. We can advise them ,not
live our lives through them .They are
individual souls and each comes with her own path chalked out .They come to
earth wired to live out their souls
blueprint and when we impose our own egoistic man made ambitious plans on them
we kill their spirit and their sparkle. A person who is wired to be an artist can
never make a great engineer or a lawyer. Excellence can shine forth only when a
person chooses to do what he loves.
In the Bhagvad gita, Krishna
urges Arjuna very firmly to live an authentic life according to his Svadharma .
He warns us that performing duties to please others (para dharma) will alter
the course of our lives for the worse.
Even the great masters are careful
not to interfere with the freewill of their disciples, it is thus that you will
see that a true Master will just point the way. A Master will never compel
anyone to make a choice ,for a Master knows that ultimately all choices have to
be made by the individual. He is aware of the amount of karma he will incur by
dictating and tampering with another’s freewill, even if the other is a close
relative like a child or a spouse.
If the soul has a plan for
us it stands to reason that the best choices we make will be those that are
made in communion and alignment with our souls. That brings us back to the
question of awareness. A person who
is awake, alert and aware of what he is choosing therefore is one who chooses
wisely. It is rather ironic
that half of the time we are on automatic pilot and we choose unconsciously,
even though many of our choices can be life altering. Any person who is
following the beaten track and living out choices that are not his own is
blocking the plan his soul has charted.
“I took the road
less travelled by
And that has made all the difference”
says poet Robert Frost in
one of his best loved poems.These lines stress the importance of choices and
reminds us that regardless of the choice
we make, our life will be enormously affected by it. Frost speaks about making
a choice based on one’s interest and one’s passion. He symbolized this in his
poem The Road not taken, by showing
himself standing at a fork in the road. He knew he could walk down but one path
and he knew the decision lay solely with him. The sad part of life is that most
people do not even realize that the decision of how to carry their lives
forward rests solely on them. They choose not to choose but even that is a
choice, a weaker choice that will hamper their journey towards their pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow.
What helped Frost take the
road less travelled and leave safe shores of America for an unknown land (England) where he tried his hand at poetry? (and
succeeded!) Was it merely the abilty to take risks? Or was it that he was aware
that he had been given freewill and had the freedom to make a choice?
In a period of time when
people unconsciously followed the herd, choosing not to choose, Frost
epitomizes the freedom of choice that is every human’s birthright.
Yes, the power of making a
choice has been given only to the human. And the intellect is the instrument that he has been endowed with to aid
him in exercising this mammoth responsibility.
Yet how many of us really
sit and think out our choices? Aren’t we rather swayed by emotions while making a choice? The world is in this shape today
because of decisions taken in haste.
“Decide in haste repent at leisure” our ancestors warn us stressing the
need of taking time out and making responsible choices.
A calm and collected mind
thus seems to be the ideal before making a crucial choice. Though one needs to
at times consult near ones, and move from emotion to intellect while making a
choice, the highest choices remain those that are motivated by the soul. Managing
our self thus means making smart choices in tangent with the Higher self.. I
say smart choices instead of right choices for what may be a right choice for
one need not be the right choice for another. If Dad is a doctor and loves the
profession, that is the right choice for him but Ratan is totally a different
entity and the same choice may mean suicide for him, if his
cells are filled with the sound of music.
Finally the most important
choice we can make is the way in which we choose to see life. If we choose to
see ourselves as alien separate beings in a hostile world, that will be our
destiny in this world of relativity.
If on the other hand we
choose to see the world as One huge unit then naturally the actions that stem
from such a choice will be of love and peace for how can you hurt others if all
others are part of this ONE? And so our choices made out of oneness will chart
out a beautiful destiny .
As one gets into the flow of following the nudges of one’s Higher self ,one
then slips into the enviable state of what J.krishnamurthy calls choice less
awareness, where one just responds to the present moment spontaneously without
any preconceived ideas. Where one’s actions are directed not even by choice but
just awareness.
Till we reach this state
where the chooser and the doer cease to exist and there is only
the soul witnessing the experiences it has created with Life, we need to take
small steps in being aware of even the littlest choices we make. Choosing to
shut out external noise once in a while and connect to the stillness within and
thus Choosing to connect to our
Higher Self goes a long way in helping us make all other choices.
When we choose to allow others to create their
own painting on the canvas of life using
their own colours of choices, we truly choose to give the greatest
gift to self and others-freedom-the birthright of every soul.
