Journey of life

Hi everyone ! Today I feel like talking about something a touch (maybe even a press!) philosophical, so please excuse me if it gets a little heavy...but hey, we can all handle a little load, can't we? So that means we venture to ask ourselves one simple question: WHAT IS LIFE ? ....... No, I don't intend this to be an intense, didactic value education essay (I am no guru)... rather, I just want to pour out some thoughts or questions for all of us......

If we google the above question, we will get loads of book names, famous quotes, religious references, philosophy writers and what not! It probably has been asked through centuries in thousands of languages in millions of contexts....some wise men have defined life as the path to God, some others as love, some as success, some as fate, yet some as a goal worth living for, besides others. But the concept of life as just a JOURNEY always fascinated me....don't exactly know which school of thought this belongs to and it doesn't really matter anyways. The philosphy of life being a journey in time appeals to me because, for starters, it is simple to understand, and it also doesn't have religious or political undertones as the others, besides marrying well with science.

Like any journey, Curiosity is our invisible, but ever-present, co-passenger in life, always wanting to know what lies beyond the next turn! Some ways look more familiar than others (feeling of deja vu)....some roads bumpier than others....and inevitably the journey always gets slower on the rougher terrain, often making the pain more agonizing....and seems to speed over the smoother parts - too fast to enjoy the surrounding beauty to its fullest!

For the most part of our lives, we move on...... move away...... move over...... move towards.... but rarely ever move FOR something or someone......because somewhere along the entire journey, its very reason gets lost...the reason to go to the next destination erodes away and the destination starts becoming the reason!

Our lives, again like any other journey, are also checkered with images, sounds and feelings from the trail of the past....... bright memories and gray shadows from the roads left behind of childhood, teenage and youth.... by this time, our good friend Curiosity has got off somewhere and Nostalgia has got aboard. We no longer yearn to see the next turn but often look over our shoulders into the haze of yesteryears!

And finally like every journey, life has a definite beginning and end. It ends exactly in the manner it once began...with suddenness and the eternal truth of all existence...neither is there a clicking stopwatch throughout the way, nor is there a countdown at either end of the road! But it is true that some lives (the few great ones) begin from where they ended.....most great men become "great" only after their journeys end....guess only theirs should be called LIFE CYCLES, while others should be spared that scientific misnomer and just called LIVES (linearly so)! However, in spite of the eventuality of every journey's end (with no heavenly luxury facilities to look forward to!), I feel there is a certain beauty in this prosaic and nonchalant sense of mortality...... The greatness of LIFE is in the JOURNEY that comprises it! How's that for simplicity?

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." - Oscar Wilde