The Contrast

Why is it that life is so hard ? Let’s have a little look here. Maybe we find something if we look together.

Familiarity leads to lack of gratitude.

– Radhanath Swami

• Whatever we have, we may not deserve. And even if we do, there must be someone else, who is more talented, hard working, intuitive, strong, smart or due to some other quality, may deserve it more than we do.
• There are some possessions of ours, which we do not even acknowledge anymore. Things like the expensive clothes, shoes, cars, colognes and everything else that we can’t even recall at this moment.
• And last, but should be first, everything that comes free to us, but is actually worth more than every single jewel on earth. Our bodies, our minds, our families and friends, our thoughts, our emotions, our passions (well this list will take a whole other article, and even if we sit together, we won’t be able to complete it).

We don’t value contrast anymore. We accept nothing else but our current reality to be ours, thinking we are owed that much, and that’s why we have it. Language, for example, is something we don’t even think about, while using it to communicate from the second that we wake up in the morning till the time after we fall asleep (I’m aiming at you, people who talk in their sleep). If we take a little time to think about it, there must have been a whole mess of crap that the predecessors of the modern man had to go through to create language for us to communicate with, while being the ingrates that we are. Mind you, this is just one example. There are countless more (which again, will need another article).

We live in the most advanced era known to mankind, without a doubt. And even in this age, we find ways to not reach the pinnacle of success in fields we intend to be in. Even in this age, we see that the level of fitness in humans is at the worst since the inception of time. Even in this age, we see the environmental conditions degrading by the second. Even in this age, we see people disrespecting their own parents, knowing that they are doing so to the people that not only gave birth to them, but raised them to a point where they are capable to disrupt the lives of the people who gave birth to them (We live in a real Frankenstein-ly world, don’t we?).

Why not reverse this? Why not make a little effort to grow, while being able to appreciate all the things that are available to us at every single second of the day? Why not have the ability to realize that there might be a tiny, little flaw in our mindsets that is hindering our journey to getting to the apex of human potential? A little shift towards appreciation, gratitude and humility can help us with these problems.

Let’s take a little time for being less of an ingrate, and more grateful. Not because it’ll make the past generations or the creators of our possessions happy, but because it’ll make us appreciate the gifted state we live in today, enable us to live up to our true potentials.

I hope all of us, who started reading with a mindset of being ungrateful (while reading it on our big and very very smart phones/laptops), would be compelled to take a little time to be more grateful after reading.

Thanks for reading. Please let me know of what you thought about it in the comments. Peace!