Our species is a strange one. It likes to believe that all will be well in the long run. As the sun flies through the universe with its tiny little blue planet, the even tinier us like to believe that we are invincible, that we are not a happenstance but part of a larger design and a larger plan.
Even our
most outrageous stories which dare to explore the concept of chaos, end up
bringing the world to an order. Look at our popular culture icons over the last
couple of decades. For every Joker, we find our batman, every time an Evil-Lyn embraces
chaos and wants to let it loose, a Teela rises up to being order. Even our
games call chaos Magic and asks mages and witchers to control them.
In our worldview
order is good. Order gets things done. Ordre is the natural form of life and
hence when cataclysmic events completely turn our worlds upside down, we get
afraid of Armageddon. The Hindu pantheon calls upon Vishnu to preserve after
Shiva’s Tandava destroys everything.
If you have
managed to read through some of the older posts, you might see that the
questions that troubled Siddhartha troubles me as well. He however became The
Buddha and I just read about his journey and his teachings. The three biggest
sources of suffering illness, old age, death starts taking new meaning in a
world that we live in today. With everything up in the air, mortality has come
closer to home. Age crept up while we masked up and illnesses became many with
treatments becoming more and more expensive.
2020 was the
year of survival. 2021 was the year of reassessment. How 2022 will turn out is
anyone’s guess but as we have seen over and over again throughout our history,
hope is eternal.
And as
Bollywood puts it beautifully, “If the ending is not happy, it just means the
film is not over yet.”
So there it
is – another year goes by and when we look back fondly many years from now, we
will remember how we survived on hope and prayers.
Because all
will be well in the end.
