TRANQUILITY: FOCUS

Perhaps every species on this planet has many issues, which are unanswered, humans are no exception. The ability to understand one own self leads us through a pretty complex lane, which has got many by-lanes. Let me start by putting before you a conversation between me and a friend of mine during my initial days at IIT Delhi …

Me: What is that you have gained by coming to this place?
Friend: I feel satisfied for I earned the seat for my hard work.
Me: What next?
Friend: I don’t know.
Me: What do you want to do… I mean what you want to achieve in your life?
Friend: I wish to be an engineer ….a good.no a bright one!
(I didn’t see another being with such an excited face)
Me: How do you know that you are satisfied?
Friend: What sort of question is that?
Me: well let me frame it in a different way.how do you define satisfaction?
Friend: I don’t know how to define it …I am happy for what I got… perhaps that is satisfaction.
Me: So you mean to say you are satisfied with your life?
Friend: No. I was talking about me getting into IIT. You tell me aren’t you satisfied with your life. I mean how do you define satisfaction?
Me: Satisfaction is a relative phenomenon. You feel satisfied till you don’t face a new situation wherein you need to work from scratch… it is time bound. No one can be satisfied with their life throughout. There will be hiccups here and there when you need to work your way through …
Friend: So what you want in life?
Me: I can’t take that question for I don’t know the answer myself.
Friend: neither do I …

The conversation drifted into other topics and died down at 2 in the morning. We still stood at that point where we were searching for the answer to the question what satisfaction is all about?

I had a keen interest to know the answer to the question was, I started observing people around me what is it that made them happy. Content, why is it that me and most of my peers aren’t able to identify what we want from our lives? After a long watch, I can say that many of us who didn’t understand what satisfaction is. …were either unable to recognize what it is or we are undergoing a phase of transformation from being pampered to facing the world ourselves… everything tends to be right…. everything is interesting and appeals to our mind to pursue it. But why is it that we are unable to judge what suits us. What is it that defines satisfaction of the person??

I find it interesting to understand that people tend to frame an opinion about the world depending upon his or her own surroundings, circumstances which were encountered, they tend to react in a manner which is intrinsically related to their way of thinking …. I find it amusing to note that transformation in a person is dependent not only on the above mentioned factors but is also dependent on how one event leads to other. Let us consider an example of a kid who is pampered a lot, he tends to think that everything is easy to achieve, when you get what you want so easily, rarely do we appreciate the fact that it isn’t that easy as it is made out to be , it is always easy to criticize a decision than to arrive at one … this is the fact which I understood when I was thrown into a situation wherein I was judged on the basis of the decision taken…situations which life offers are complex and tend to affect other parameters which we might not even think about.No matter how confident you are about yourself, there are always things that might surprise you about your own self.. just like vast spreads of water in the sea doesnt stop it from being thirsty.. its only that rivers understand it..