“I have decided long back in my life that nothing is worth taking seriously,” said my friend in a rather serious tone. We happened to meet after a long time and were catching up with each other. He has gone through several ups and downs in his personal and professional life. Apparently, this approach towards life stood him in good stead until the coronavirus struck the world with full force, jolting everyone out of their comfort zone.
While I pitied and empathised with the plight of migrant workers sitting in my home, he struggled to reach out to his students who did not have good connectivity. Some did not even have any device to connect to the Internet. “Being a teacher is hard if you take things seriously,” he said with a smile, noticing my confused face. “Being a human is hard,” he said as an afterthought watching the image, on the muted TV, of a wife trying to breathe life in her husband who was dying outside a hospital for want of oxygen. He echoed my thoughts that swayed from frustration and anger to helplessness and fear about the unfolding grim situation.
To divert our conversation from COVID-19, I asked him if he was still interested in poetry. “Yes,” he said emphatically. The poetry kept him sane. The poetry reminded him of his life-philosophy of not taking things seriously, whenever he got serious. “Really?” I nudged him, and he was his old self, reciting a couplet by his favourite Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib: “Baasicha-e-atfaal hai duniya mere aage, hota hai shab-e-roz tamasha mere aage (The world is a child’s playground in front of me, and day and night I see a play being enacted in front of me).”
“Detachment is the key,” he said. “The only way to bear all that unfair and unjust treatment that life metes you out is to detach yourself from yourself and watch the proceedings from a distance,” he said. “For most people, time provides the distance. As time passes by, suffering lessens or is replaced by new sufferings. Time is the healer, as they say. For people like me, poetry provides this perspective from afar in real time,” he said philosophically. “Poetry is therapeutic,” he added after a brief pause.
I remembered a poetry book titled Poetry Pharmacy that I recently came across. The author William Sieghart claimed to prescribe a poem for every emotional ailment people generally suffer from. He prescribed Hafez’s lines to one suffering from exhaustion: I wish I could show you, When you are lonely or in darkness, The astonishing light of your own being!
I told him about the book. He agreed and said that Dewan-e-Ghalib, the poetry collection by Ghalib, was his pharmacy. “Rau mein hai raksh-e-umr kahan dekhiye thame, na haath baag pe hain, na paa hain raqab mein.”
He was now referring to the out of control situation. As this couplet says, “the horse of life that we are riding is running on its own, let’s see where it stops. We neither have the reins in our hands nor do we have feet in the harness.”
But this has always been the case, isn’t it, I wondered. Even in normal times, when life appears to be happening as per our free will, we hardly have everything under control. It is always a matter of chance. This simple truth of life is made amply clear by the present times. But if it is so, then why be so serious about it? Let’s play our part and see how chance favours us. Alan Watts, the famous Zen philosopher of the 1950s and 1960s, used to say that life is a game. If you really want to enjoy it, play the game and witness it too. My friend seemed to have read my thoughts as he nodded affirmatively and said, “Don’t think too much; this too shall pass.”
“Well,” I thought, “I wish I could take things lightly, seriously!”
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