What to do when you feel lost in void with no hope or light? Those lonely nights when all seem lost and you start pondering over everything you could have done right with that ache in your heart. Those painful mornings when you simply don't want to get up and face the world, because “happy” people remind you of happiness that you have lost and probably will never get again. What do you do when Life shatters all your hope making you question your very own existence? How do you live ,when your dreams die?
Haven't we all gone through this at some point of time in our lives? So,why are we still asking this? Well, because everyone has to face one's own Kurukshetra and most of the times we have no ‘Sarthi’ like Krishna. We ourselves have to find our answers. And no one else can answer this for us. Absolutely no one.
In such moments, words, logic, philosophical quotes- stop making any sense. They all seem pretentious and fake. Only thing that helps, is silence and those talks with self. Grieving is an important part of getting over grief. So , we can cry, as much as we want. We can be angry with ourselves, world or Gods, for a while. It’s all okay. But as humans, after a while we are bound to get fed up with all of this. That is the moment we realize even darkness has a special light. That is the precise moment we must start looking for that Light ,that hope ,that dream. Because it is our duty to dream again. We owe it to ourselves.
Philosophers of the world have dived deep into this question and almost all of them have come to similar conclusion. From Buddha to Krishna, Socrates to Dalai-lama, all of them suggested only one way- “Detached-Attachment”.
In course of life we generally get attached to certain people or things in such a way that we never want to lose them. We do everything in our capacity to keep them close and after a while start equating them with our Happiness or even Life. Anything else, without them, appears meaningless and it becomes impossible for us to imagine our life without them. This part is called "attachment".
However, we must realize that despite our best wishes and efforts, life will charter its own course. We will fail to fulfill some dreams despite everything. There are myriad factors that decide the fulfillment of one's dream and sometimes those factors are against us and we can do nothing about them. In this vastness of universe we are a tiny dust particle and we have no control over 99.99% of things. Sometimes things will happen as per our wishes, most of the times they won’t. That's Life and that's how it has always been .All we can do is try to control the controllable and pray the uncontrollable act in our favour, while simultaneously accepting that they might not, and that's okay.
In such moments only thing that can help us pick up those broken pieces is "acceptance". We must accept the fact that life will go on , with or without us. There is no finality in Life. We give meaning to it. So no dream can be the final one. Everything changes as time and space around us change. As humans we are meant to dream new dreams. That has been our biggest survival mechanism since the beginning.
So while attaching ourselves to our Dreams,we must be detached to the outcomes so that we could continue this journey, realizing the impermanence of everything. Nothing is going to be here forever. Everything is transient and it will all vanish one day, sooner than later. This realization has power to give us the reason to live and continue in our own pursuit. It gives us courage to Dream again.
As Gramsci said, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned”. I would say, that's the greatest challenge of Life as well.
So when dreams die - Dare to dream another dream and another one . That's the only way to live.
