14. WHAT IS THE BIG HURRY?

TAKE LIFE IN SMALL DOSES

The other day I came across an advertisement in a magazine. It was for a painkiller - a headache pill, or something of that sort: A modern young woman smiled at me confidently from the ad. The ad said:

• 6 am wake up 8 am - kids 9 am - office 11 am - meeting 1 pm - business lunch 6 pm - traffic 7 pm - groceries 8 pm - guests 10 pm - (name of pill) The woman was smiling as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have a headache pill every night before bed. It was so beautifully conveyed!

What sort of life is this to be leading? To be running from morning to night, from one day to the next! No wonder she has a headache every night!

And the worst thing is, this pace of life has become totally normal, totally accepted today. It has become totally normal to be in a desperate hurry, rushing through life.

Just stop on the road and watch the traffic at a signal.

Everybody is busy tooting their horns for no reason in particular.

And the instant the lights change, if one unfortunate person isn't able to

start his car on time, there will be a hundred people honking him off the road.

Hurry seems to be the peculiar disease of our time.

Machines are being invented every day to do work faster and faster. The fastest computers perform thousands of operations every second.

Supersonic jets carry us from one place to another at speeds greater than the speed of sound.

Communication networks transmit information at tremendous speeds across continents, via satellites stationed far above the earth.

As they say, we have communication @ the speed of thought!

But where are we going in such a hurry?

Where are we all running to?

Or rather, what are we all running away from?

The truth is, we are running towards and running away from.

We are driven by two equally compelling reasons: Greed and Fear.

Greed tells us: there is no time! In the span of sixty or seventy years granted to you, you need to live out so many desires! You need to possess the maximum number of things, you need to taste the maximum number of experiences.

You need to live life with a vengeance!

Like a terminally ill patient determined to enjoy the last couple of months of his life, we rush from pleasure to pleasure endlessly.

And every day, we come under fresh assaults from the media.

When you are going to work, just read the hoardings on the road. They are all saying the same thing!

When you go home, switch on the television and watch the ads.

What are they saying? The same thing!

Every hour of the day, we are being told that our life would be incomplete without a new job, a new car, a new girlfriend, a new home. Where is the time to acquire all that we need? So we start running.

We have to earn, we have to prove ourselves!

And since we have so little time, we have to lead multiple lives.

We try to cram 48 hours, 72 hours into each day. Ultimately, we have to cram several lifetimes into one!

But physically, there is a limit to what we can do in one day. We can only be in one place at a time. So we begin to live part of our lives cerebrally with our minds.

This is the latest way of living our lives!

Cerebral enjoyment is nothing but enjoying without really enjoying.

The software engineer working till 3am or 4am in his office in the city is sure to have on his computer desktop a beautiful picture of mountains or a beach!

Sitting in his office, he watches and enjoys the beauty of the mountains; he tries to listen to the waves on the beach.

What is this called..? There's a word… Multitasking? According to the engineer, he is multitasking! Working in his office, he is also enjoying on the beach. A smart choice!

But the sad truth is, the picture on his desktop represents the holiday he will never have the time to take. Because he is too busy working, too busy aiming at that miraculous promotion that will make him the company's youngest project manager, years ahead of his time.

We are obsessed with the idea of finishing things before their time.

These days, we try to toilet-train six-month-old babies!

We expect our children to grow up years faster than their time.

It is as absurd as expecting a mango tree to bear fruit in the very first year! It simply goes against the nature of the tree.

Why do we do this?

In earlier times, one lifetime seemed perfectly sufficient to do whatever one desired in life.

After all, what did a man want? After some amount of education, he would continue to look after his father's fields or his business. He would get married, produce children and live out his life in the same town, in the same house. Where was the hurry?

Now, we no longer have the patience to live life as it comes!

A few weeks ago, a young man came to see me. He must have been in his mid-thirties, working in a private firm.

He told me,

I've got everything settled, Swamiji.

I'm building a house for which I've taken a 25-year loan. By the time the loan is paid up, my daughter will be married and settled (his daughter was a little girl who was holding his hand). My son would also be settled in a job (his wife was carrying an infant boy in her arms). By then the land would have appreciated in the area where we're building our house. So we can sell it out. My wife can take VRS (voluntary retirement) which will fetch us some additional benefits. After settling some amount on our grandchildren, we can invest the rest and then settle down in your ashram. Definitely we'll be coming to the ashram Swamiji. Our life is with you only!

Just imagine!

In the five minutes that he talked to me, the man had finished with 25 years of his life! He was in such a hurry, he had extracted the juice out of those 25 years by thinking about it, by planning it all ahead of time. Now what was left for living was just the dried-up skin called life.

And he was telling me that his sole interest in life was spirituality except for the call of duty which was forcing him to carry on his life in this way.

Tell me, is this a spiritual way of living life, mortgaging the present to the future?

Loans and credit cards are nothing but ways of trying to live tomorrow's life today. We spend today the money that we are going to earn tomorrow!

While still in the present, we manage to live our future. Is that possible? It's a reversal of time that would interest Einstein!

Our lives are a constant running towards the future. Whatever is available today is never sufficient, never good enough for us.

This is a relatively new phenomenon, especially in the East. For centuries, we have been used to thinking of this life as a 'passing phase'. The idea of reincarnation, of a cycle of birth and death, was built so strongly into our minds that people would think,

So what if we don't fulfill all our desires this time? There's always another life!

Whereas Hurry, like science and technology, is a gift of the West.

Naturally, because in the West people do not believe in more than one life.

In fact, hurry is just negative fallout of the positive discipline of science. Science helps us live life at its optimum. Technology helps us get the maximum out of this life. In terms of psychology, we could say science is the extroverted, outward-looking part of ourselves.

Science is consciousness spiraling outward. Science aims at accumulating knowledge, at achieving results, at doing things faster and better. Without science, we would still be in the bullock-cart age!

But science carried too far results in the kind of mad hurry we see today. This constant running only reflects the restlessness we feel inside.

In fact, it is because of our inner restlessness that we feel compelled to run. We feel we are missing out on something important. We don't know what it is, but we have to hurry up and find it!

How many of us have dreamt, at some time or the other, of missing an important train or bus?

This is a very common dream, and very significant.

It shows that most of us are living in fear of having missed out on life.

Deep inside, we sense that somehow we have missed the train of life.

Throughout the dream we are hurrying, hurrying, checking the timetable, making plans, screaming to each other to hurry up. But when we finally make it to the station, the train is already leaving. It is too late!

These days, we even have simultaneous bookings on five different trains; so many backup plans, yet we find that we have somehow missed them all.

This is exactly what happens in our lives.

Our behaviour today is like a child who is given ten lollipops of different flavours, and only five minutes to eat them! We take greedy licks out of each of them, but have no time to truly savour any of the flavours.

Just for a moment, turn around and see clearly how you have led your life in the past five years.

How often have you given up doing things that you really wanted to do simply because there was no time?

Was all the running worth it?

Understand, I don't mean that it is alright to lead our lives in philosophical lethargy - the custom in the East!

It does not mean postponing life.

It is not possible to live only in the present, ignoring the future altogether.

Every day, we are called upon to take action, make decisions. We have to live with deadlines. We have to think ahead, fulfill our dreams.

Certainly, you should plan for tomorrow.

But don't forget to live today!

What I mean is, live consciously.

Live with awareness.

Learn to be present in every moment of your life.

Whatever you are doing at the moment, do it with totality.

Watch every act.

Even if it is an everyday act, do it as if you were doing it for the first time.

Of course, it is not easy. Most of the time we don't do very interesting things at least, not the things that we normally call interesting! At nine in the morning, you may be on a crowded bus on your way to work. At eight in the night, you may be finishing household tasks - like the woman in the advertisement. It doesn't matter!

Whatever you do, do it with totality.

Be very clear: this is the reality of the moment. There is no running away from it.

So you may as well enjoy it, enjoy washing the dishes or whatever you are doing! Even if you want to, you can't run two hours into the future where you are fast asleep in bed. Maybe mentally you can do it, but physically this is where you are!

Lao Tzu uses the beautiful word Wei-wu-wei.

Wei-wu-wei means action without action.

It must be the most joyous way to live!

Wei-wu-wei is to enter into each action totally, playfully, spontaneously. It is a beautiful way of transforming work into play.

The next time you are feeling miserable about washing the dishes, just call your child over and give him or her a chance!

Just watch how she does it. She washes the dishes with every cell of her little body! She enjoys every pattern the soap bubbles make on the dishes. She is in no hurry to finish it and get on with more important things in her life.

In fact, for every child, whatever she is doing at the moment is the most important thing in her life!

That is Wei-wu-wei.

So this constant discontentment with the present, the greed to cram more and more into one lifetime, is one reason why we are always in a hurry.

But greed is not the only reason!

For many of us, it is also because we are afraid to stop.

Fear is a major reason why we cling so much to the outer flow of life.

Hurrying is a way of escaping from ourselves!

To stop, to stand still for a moment, is to encounter our deepest selves. It is to come face to face with the silence and stillness inside. For minds accustomed to the constant din of the outside world, encountering this silence can be a terrifying experience.

Seriously, how many of us have the courage to face ourselves?

To look inward is to run the risk of discovering that after running and running; we haven't moved at all.

This is one reason why so many people are afraid of meditation. They come to me and say, Swamiji, what should I do to experience peace of mind?

If I tell them to go around some temple 108 times, they will do it happily. After all, that is still something that they can do running! But if I ask them to spend half an hour in meditation, that is too much.

In Zen, they have a beautiful meditation practice called just sitting. What a name: just sitting!

Zen is the only religion today that is truly alive, truly responsive to the changing needs of each time and age.

In just sitting meditation, participants have to do just that: sit still and do nothing. Actually, all meditation is about sitting still and doing nothing, but this technique makes us do it consciously.

And nothing can be tougher for most people! All our lives we have been moving with such terrific momentum, that simply to stop, requires supreme effort.

Because to stop is to take a fresh look at our lives.

To get in touch with our forgotten selves.

To see clearly what we're doing, and why we're doing it.

(Even if it means finding out that most of the reasons we started out with don't hold good anymore.)

There is no other way!

Remember, even the best transatlantic carriers can't fly endlessly without refueling.

To hurry endlessly is a sure way to invite neurosis.

Stopping is a healing process in itself.

Stopping gives meaning to all our hurrying.

Try this fun experiment with your family or friends: tell each other when to STOP!

This is an excellent technique.

When you are in the middle of something, if someone screams, Stop! Just stop whatever you may be doing, even if it is in the middle of lifting your leg, you will be suddenly thrown back into the present!

There is a sudden pause in your hurrying.

You make a leap into awareness.

You re-enter the Now!