Beauty

June 10, 2010

Since the ancient days, when life was simple and meaningful, the human body has been termed as the ‘Temple of the Living God’. As we head towards what we call, with pride, our common future, we sometimes forget the basic things in life-the things that make our life special and not merely a database. Joy, ecstasy, bliss, and most importantly love makes our life beautiful. This beauty is rapidly fading in this world and we are slowly becoming nothing more than machines that neither feel anything nor can perceive any emotion. The glory of this beauty is love and life is the manifestation of God’s artistic nature. The beauty of life and everything created by God should not fade with time. If it does, as it is now, owing partly to the inhuman atrocities of the corporate world, then we are heading for another dark era. It is this beauty that blessed people like the Buddha, Swami Vivekananda and Mahavir wanted us to see and find out just as they had figured out that it leads to divinity and true joy to the soul. Eminent authors like Paulo Coelho, Mitch Albom and Robin Sharma has stressed on this and has rightfully done so. The beauty of life and its manifestation is truly the cause that the human body can be referred to as the ‘Temple of the Living God’.

It is the small things in life, that seem so trivial, that make life so beautiful and special. The Splendor of life is a force that drives us all, whether we can feel it or not. It is a force that can be felt at all times-we just have to know how to recognize it. It is this force that makes us believe even in the darkest of times, that we can still light the candle of hope and we refuse to give up. This strength comes straight from God. In our hour of darkness, God will never fail to come to us and whisper words of wisdom to us to keep going on. The power of our will and refusal to ever lose hope is one of the main aspects of beauty that adorns us. It is the beauty of life that gives us the strength to fight for right against might.

Beauty is not at all an interface to hide from us the real truth, as it is nowadays thought of as, but something much greater. The exquisiteness of life is not what appeals to our eyes but what appeals to our hearts. And it is this aspect of the loveliness that is associated with life that makes us one with the rest of God’s creations. This Magnificence makes us a part of the ‘Soul of the Universe’ as we were destined to be. In it lies true happiness. It is this gorgeousness of life that makes solitude pleasant and appealing to the heart and not painful as it seems to people who refuse to surrender to this eternal beauty. Unfortunately people of this century have become so ambitious and tend to seem so busy that they hate to think about life and its driving force and thus life has ceased to be simple and meaningful. Thinking of these things reminds me of the song ‘Coming back to Life’-it is perfectly suitable for today’s SMS generation. We are so busy with our lives that we do not find the time to stop by, look and reflect at our own life which means so much to us, and say to ourselves, “Is this all I want? Is there something missing?” Mitch Albom correctly says that those who know themselves dying are alien to the living. It is because once we know that our time on earth is limited and our days are numbered, we start looking at life in a totally different way. It is at this time that we see how beautiful life is and how meaningless running after things like money and fame are.

This reminds me of an incident that happened a couple of days back right in front of my eyes. The day was bright and it was the afternoon when I was coming home after school. I saw a typical aged Bengali walking slowly down the same footpath as me clad in white ‘dhoti’ and ‘Punjabi’ with an umbrella. Most people were storming past this old gentleman without even noticing him. Then all of a sudden, a black Toyota Corolla stooped near the footpath and from it came out a man of not more than thirty five wearing a grey expensive looking suit. By the looks of the man, I could tell that he was quite well off. And to my utter surprise, the young man went to the old man, stooped down on the ground and this led to his pants kissing the road and shoes getting unnatural folds. What he did was ‘Pranam’. It is a gesture and an act of respect in the Bengali culture that a young man does meet an old man after a long time. The act that he did regardless of his clothes and the people around him really depicts how beautiful a true honest and grateful heart can be. That day I was seriously moved by seeing this incident. That made me believe strongly in the saying that if we are true to ourselves and do what we think is right, then we can live up to the expectation of being the ‘Temple of the living God’.

On our deathbed, we would never wish that we spent more time in our office. In the end, social status, money, fame nothing actually means to us. What really matters is how we could live our life by loving and letting love come in. And that is the beauty of life and reason for our existence.