Is Life A Struggle?
“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.” Slavoj Žižek
Life is not easy. It is not easy to live.
As a thinking, conscious, able bodied human, I feel as if life is a torrent of never-ceasing imagination, feelings and emotions.
I often wonder how is it that I’m supposed to live?
I haven’t pushed myself to answer this by referring to society’s bland and myopic standards. Rather, I’ve allowed myself the luxury of time that is essential when approaching such a weighted query. I’ve let the question gestate inside my head abundantly, fancying that my humble power of self-reflection and deliberate efforts at character building will finally light up the way.
I am searching, sincerely and earnestly, for a good enough answer to “How am I supposed to live?”
In this essay, I’ve tried to articulate somewhat about the struggles associated with living.
Is life an endless struggle?
Few days ago, I learnt about the concept of Mara, a demonic representative of all earthly attachments in the Buddhist scriptures. According to Zen teacher Lynn Jnana Sipe,
Mara symbolizes the entire existence of unenlightened humanity. In other words, Mara’s realm is the whole of samsaric existence. Mara saturates every nook and cranny of life. Only in Nirvana is his influence unknown. (1)
Mara, in its myriad, infinite forms, stands between a human being and his ultimate awakening. Prince Siddhartha of Lumbini (modern day Nepal) encountered Mara countless times before finally achieving enlightenment to become the first Buddha. He deftly identified the demon each time it sprung up, and kept insisting that he can see it. The evil dissipated each time (even turned into flowers!) in the face of blatant acknowledgement and thoughtful inaction on the part of the yet to be Buddha. Finally, Mara gave up. And the persistent prince achieved true illumination.
I think one of the ways I look at life is through the lens of perpetual struggle.
It is a daily, consistent struggle for me to sincerely mind my own business, to be kind to the deserving and also to the undeserving, to be a thoughtful and well intentioned human being worthy of my human birth, and to be thankful for and respectful of the fantastic serendipity — the miracle of my life.
I often let Mara abuse my time and space.
Live and let live — four words, yet profoundly difficult to internalize and actualize. It is a continuous struggle.
To place it in the context of my daily life, it can mean consciously acting out something similar to the Serenity prayer, attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, the Lutheran theologian (1892–1971)—
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
How am I faring?
The concept of Mara clarified a number of essential sub-contexts of my query “How am I supposed to live?”. I learnt that —
a/ It’s hard to stay mindful, and much harder to continuously identify the various forms of Mara rising inside and arriving from the outside.
b/ Even with practiced, deliberate mindfulness, it’s still easy to lose focus on the important things, and it’s easy to fool one’s own self. Unfortunately, time keeps running out.
c/ Only with insistent mindfulness and deliberate, self-correcting focus, am I able to stay true to my True North — my true self, the one within. Otherwise, it is very easy to lose one’s self again and again till all is truly lost… i.e. my infinity, the time I have, is lost forever.
d/ It’s imperative to understand the distinction between needs and wants better with age and experience. I should also clearly distinguish between feelings and emotions. Therein lies the success and usefulness of my years and struggles. I should strive to be wiser, no matter how inviting the forms of temptation, or deplorable the situations.
d/ The more urgently I practice being my true self and maintain a constant vigilance against lapse of judgement and character, the better. Because I don’t really have infinite time to keep living falsely. The more Mara’s I encounter, the more time I invest in becoming resilient and practicing anti-fragility — therefore, ultimately, I’ll end up making more time for conscious, elevated living.
It’s all a gargantuan struggle for me.
But, I’ve learnt that it’ll be worth it.
I’ve already felt flecks of gold seeping in through the pried open windows of my consciousness.
It’s delightful in its sheer bliss.
It makes the struggle absolutely worth it.
A note on the featured image: I drew/painted it after drawing inspiration from an illustration (2) I found on Pinterest, and after ruminating for weeks on the topic of Mara. Somehow, the two concepts merged in my head to give rise to the notion behind the drawing —
An ocean or a seemingly infinite field of Mara that I must walk through, and transcend— to realize who I am, and to finally be one with the truth of existence, the cosmic oneness. The glorious vision of a human to sustain forever as an enlightened, universal being of nature. Perhaps it’s a bit abstract. Coincidentally, I ended up drawing the back profile of my mother while trying to draw the human figure on my own instead of copying from the illustration.
Once I showed the finished drawing to her, my mom pointed out a 1922 song written by the polymath Rabindranath Tagore, which we both found resonating with a similar daring vision as my meagre creation. The first two lines of the song (3) can be translated as —
I’ll cross the ocean of Mara, amidst terrible storms,
On this fearless vessel of mine.
References:
(1) O’Brien, Barbara. (2020, August 26). The Demon Mara. Retrieved from https://www.learnreligions.com/the-demon-mara-449981
(2) Inspiration drawn from illustration
(2) Tagore’s song: https://animikha.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/
A shout-out to these good reads on Mind Talk:
Stuart Grant musing on escape from the unnecessary —
A nugget of gold by Yean Foong (M.Ed.) —
Thank you for reading :)
