Work & Duality
Work is the only path to liberation.
The heaviness I felt today was intense. It was sombre. Like the weight of the world was suddenly on my shoulders, compressing every fibre of my being.
I doubted myself and my faith. The weight of the world, I realised, is something I can never carry even in a million lifetimes (I’m a Hindu hehe).
I have realised that all the thought which I have put into this life was, in a sarcastic and ironic way, for nothing.
Because what this life ultimately boils down to is work. And all I have with me right now is my work.
My work, if it ever sees the light of the day and makes its place in the hearts of people, will be greater than myself. My being.
Isn’t that something to think about? That my being, which is a result of the infinite, the result of a process as old as time, the creation of which is literally astronomical, may one day be dwarfed by my work?
That the coming together of atoms into molecules, and of those molecules into elements and of those elements into stars and galaxies, who have, upon their explosive death, refurbished their atoms out into the cosmos…This endless recycling of resources which has resulted in the formation of other stars and planets and then become life itself. Become you and me, might one day be dwarfed by the work we produce?
Isn’t it just intensely insane that my work too is a part of the same cosmic process? And that without my work, I will be nothing? Nobody.
From the Beatles to Bruce Lee to Shakespeare and Marie Curie. From Einstein to Plato to Socrates. From Ramanujan to Brahmagupta and the many saints, writers, poets, philosophers, filmmakers, actors, inventors, architects and a myriad of others, all of them have been dwarfed by the work that they have left behind.
Their flesh and bones, identical to the endless generations that have come and gone before them, with them, and after them. But it is their work, and work only, which creates the separation between them and me.
If I stay with my work, like the greats of the old have and the greats of today still do, all will be fine. As long as my work does the talking and not me, I will be fine.
And again, how crazy is it that it is my self which will dictate what kind of work I’ll do. If my self changes, or is altered (by me or anybody else), in any which way, so will my work be altered.
I will produce my work, and from that work, a newer me will emerge. This duality, like the dual strands of the DNA. Like one single strand cannot result in life. Only duality, I have realised, is complete. A singularity is either the birth, or it is death. The beginning or the end. But what exists, what sustains, is dual. It always will be.
Like how light is both a wave and a particle. Like how there is a moon for the sun. Like how the fabric of the universe is not just space or time, but space-time. Like Yin and Yang. Like how man makes culture, and culture makes the man.
Just like that, I will make my work (happen) and my work will make me.
And so, clear of the cobwebs that have tortured my dreams, and etched within this innate duality of the cosmic fabric, I shall now work on making myself the man I want to become.
