Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Just imagine you are sitting on the bank of a river and you have your feet in it. Time is like this river. You are watching the river flow. It has brought you some good times, some not so good times. But the river of time has been constantly flowing. Sometimes you jumped in the water, and other times, water rose above your nose but some power helped you, and you came up to the surface to breathe.
Time has made you swim in its tough and pleasant times and you have come to the shore. As long as you don’t forget there is a shore to hold on, to get on whenever you had to, it is alright, you can splash around in the water. But if there is a flood, or a big current, there is no point going into it. Swim on to the shore when current is too much. This is a metaphor for life.
Sometimes you have to play (in the game of life!) There is no point in sitting on the shore all the while and watching the water on a hot summer day when the water is cool and pleasant and you are sweating. You have beautiful cold water. You want to jump in and feel it.
So in life, at times you have to be in it 100% and at times you have to sit on the shore and watch it flow. What you choose and when will depend on your intelligence and discrimination. Use your discrimination to see where you need to be playful where you need to take it seriously. When you are taking it too seriously in the worldly matters then you get drowned in it and you get sad and upset. Then, see life as a game. Failures, by their very nature, come and go. When you fail or feel you have failed you have to take life as a game and when you feel you have succeeded, achieved something, even then see it as a game. Don’t waste time lingering in the memory of your successes. This is a tough task to do. But look at your success. It is so trivial and your potential is so big and here you are going around blowing your own trumpet the whole time.
Are you wasting time?
How often do you get a feeling that life is short, time is running out and you don’t want to waste any more time? This very realization indicates you are growing. As often as this thought occurred to you, meant you were becoming more aware in life. Shouldn’t you get a prize for this realization? So many people in the world are wasting their time and they do not even know it! If you realize you have wasted time, you are fortunate. On the other hand it also means you are not taking life seriously. So shouldn’t you take life little more seriously? Are you confused now?
When you say you don’t want to waste your time in all the trivial things of life that means you are looking for something bigger, your vision is opening up, you are more committed for a bigger cause. So look back and see how much time we have wasted over trivial things in life!
The first thing to do is, realize often you have tasted time. One, who never thought of the time squandered, is either enlightened or in deep slumber. Next step is to see when you have to take it seriously. Now if you are all singing, dancing, meditating blissfully in satsang, would you call this waste of time? No. Because you are being playful. You are simply going with the flow. Now this is where life takes you to another plane of not being too serious. So the essence is, you have to be serious and playful both.
When you are serious you acquire wisdom and when you are playful you are using this wisdom. You cannot use it without acquiring it. Being only playful, makes you flaky and that playfulness loses its meaning. Being frivolous is not the same as playfulness. Unless there is some seriousness in life, playfulness has no meaning. Wake up! This is the balance we need to bring out in our lives-between playfulness and seriousness. That’s why in The Art of Living, we start every celebration with some silence.
Imagine you are sitting on the bank of a river and 2023 has passed-along with some good moments some bad moments. Now another new year is here. Usually we look forward to what the new year is going to bring for us-more misery, surprises, gifts. But this coming year, we are going to do something different. We are going to see what we can bring to the year 2024. We are going to think about how we can contribute to time. It is an infant thought to think what the year is going to give us something or the other. But the thought of the wise is how can I serve and contribute. With this conviction that our needs are taken care of, we must spread knowledge and wisdom. More and more people are looking for spirituality, for humanism.
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