Taking Ownership

Life is a gift that has been given to us by God; it is an opportunity for us to earn all that we have yearned for through the ages and often it happens that life itself leads us onto wild journeys that we hardly ever cognize. I have often thought that life is naught but a series of incidents that happen with us; a series of misfortunes or a series of unimaginable opportunities; take it as you will, the fact remains that life is a great chance that God gives us to truly understand ourselves and to truly realize what we are. Our desires and the cognition of what we truly want out of life, finally lead us to realize what kind of a person we are. Ultimately those things lead us to realize who we are and where we belong.

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I have often said that life is naught but an illusion; a dream, however living through that dream with an inescapable grip on reality is equally hard. Many times we end up being lost in that dream and in the paradox that lies between the dream world and the real world; at the end of it all we stay brooding on what is truly a dream and what is reality… If this life we take to be a dream, then we realize that the dream itself is so real; however if we start taking life seriously and think of it to be real and potent, we understand that it is indeed not so; we start to realize that in the end, all that we live for is completely useless in death; we are left with naught but a cold sense of realization that still ends up leading nowhere as we never knew what it was that we truly lived for. Such is life.

Most of us live our lives as peas scattered on a windy day; we live life without bearing any conscious sense of bearing or ownership. We know not what we truly desire and by the time we get to know that, we have already committed some acts that lead us to perpetual misery and regret. Thus the first part of truly living a happy, contented and satisfied life is to take ownership of that life and to truly understand what you seek of it. However that is easier said than done; the principal reason as to why we can never understand our own desires is that we do not know that desire in itself is very fickle. It is nothing but an intense and overbearing sense of restlessness and incompleteness; and directed by our senses and instincts, it leads us to lands where we would never otherwise go.

Thus when the very thing that motivates us; that guides us and drives us; our desires; when that very thing turns out to be so fickle, guided by the same, our life too ends up being naught but a mockery. It is of great importance to realize what these desires truly are and to address them before the urge to satiate them gets out of hand. However this needs to be done in a very systematic way as action in itself is the root of all karma; and driven by false ends, one can never realize the truth. Thus the next step in taking ownership of your life lies in taking ownership of your actions. Again, as I said before, easier said than done… We often feel that our actions are not resolute enough in their execution; put shortly, we often feel that we are not determined enough in acting which inadvertently leaves any task that we undertake incomplete; be it your career, your personal life or the mother of them all, your spiritual goals.

Taking ownership of your own actions mean taking complete and utter responsibility for all your acts. You are responsible for your acts, for in the end your acts of the present determine your future; they determine the graph of your life; hence the most important thing to know is to not let your actions be deviant or derogatory in any way; there is one simple law of life, that goodness spurs from goodness; and from vile actions, there can be nothing but vile results. But when our instincts define our desires; and when our desires drive our actions, how on earth can we hope to be pure in our acts…for deep down we all know that we are neither pure in thought…nor in desire. That in itself turns out to be the undoing of all our actions.

More on this in the next article…

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