Days are longs but the years...

I recently read somewhere that days are long and years are short. I think this is a fantastic idea - small things that we do daily add up to make up our years, but things that happen once in a while, no matter how landmark-ish, are only a flash in a pan. We forget that the way we all learnt how to walk wasn't by running a marathon, but by first observing and then trying and falling and seeking help over and over again. Most of life is like that. 

 

When I pay attention to my inner-life i realise there is a bit of a dance going on in there; there are habits, there are assumptions, and there are irrational likes and dislikes. At any point in time there is part of me trying to assess the world around me, trying to interpret experiences (i would typically do this based on my assumptions) and based on that trying to decide what action should i take to arrive at what I have assumed to be most valuable. Then there is part of me that is functioning out of sheer momentum, these are habits. They might be good or bad, but usually there isn't much thought given to it - smile at me and i will smile back, frown at me and you'll have me confused (or is it the other way around ;) and those kind of things. Then almost like pieces of iron in presence of a magnet, I find my experiences and therefore my actions strongly impacted by certain "magnets" in this world - the confusing thing, of course, is that in the world magnets don't come nicely labelled. ("What an inauspicious mess!!", I wrote to a friend ;)

In all of this, we are trying to seek peace and contentment and self-actualisation and happiness! Swami Chinmayananda said that a goal tranforms a blah of a person to a towering giant among men (of course, i paraphrased a little bit) - the right goal is the music to which my being dances in tune! oh what a dance that would be!