Growing or growing out — what is the strategy of life?
To grow is life; to stop, death. A statement of universal acceptance and no contest. However, it was some years ago when I began pondering what exactly I can grow into. Can I grow into a super successful person, a super fit person, a person with the biggest bank balance, with the fattest CV, with a large contingent of friends and admirers and envy-inducing Instagram profile? Then what happens after that? Growth begets growth, begets what? Don’t I still remain a sumptuously grown human being marching towards the grave? One spoof of a moment and all growth turns to ashes! By that pragmatics, stop or grow — all is inevitably death.
If all is death, then what is life? What is life?
Growth was not the answer to that question. And hence, I began looking for life. Life is an abstraction to say the least. Have any one of us ever seen life? Have you seen life. I haven’t. All I have is an experience of life. Or, what I assume the phenomenon called life could be. In moments of liveliness, in moments closest to the primordial instincts of love, hate, fear, joy, hunger, pleasure, I have come face to face with an experience that I have learnt to term as life. But is it life?
If these experiences within the dictates of my flickering and frolicking senses and intellect are called life — then isn’t the scope of life considerably reduced in magnitude and gravitas as compared to the perceived design of this cosmos? And then what about the multitude of other things and phenomena that are beyond my grasp — the seasons, the stars, the sprouting seed, sunshine, my mother — aren’t they life? For eons we have strived to know life and all we have are bits and pieces of derivatives, knowledge and experiences.
In all this, growing has only been an accomplice to the mundane march towards death, not to knowing life.
I take one more intimate look, this time at the passage of time that I call my life, and to my own surprise what I see is that I have never really been growing. Rather all I have been doing for the three lives decades of my life is grow out! I grew out of crawling and learnt to walk. I grew out of Enid Blyton and then Jane Austen to grow into Ashtavakra Gita. I grew out of my teenage years to become an adult. I grew out of parental protection to learn my survival prowess in the world. I grew out of the need of an illustrious career to seek what life held between and beyond the lines. I grew out of the need of a mansion to find solace in my tiny room. On the spiritual journey, I grew out of the urge of having experiences to learn to just stay and witness. All I ever did was grow out.
Maybe this is what the spiritual path points out to. Maybe if we stop growing towards death, we will one day grow out of it and finally know life.
