Where have all the flowers gone?

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I used to think that life stopped when someone dropped out of your life. I started realising that the space soon becomes filled with a myriad of other things; many of them more fruitful and fulfilling than what was there before. Then the person returns and there is a feeling of obligation where one feels compelled, almost obligated to fit them back into the old spot; and then guilty when you find that you are unable to recreate the old slot; guilty that you actually had the courage to not leave an empty space in your life.

In the words of Streisand ”used-to-be’s don’t count anymore, they just lay on the floor till we sweep them away…………….and you don’t bring me flowers anymore!”

But regardless of how much guilt you experience, the reality is that the spot is filled, and try though you might, change is an unmitigated essence of life, as it is imperative for growth; stagnation is death. Just like the roots of a plant that seeks to fill all of the vacant spaces of a new, spacious pot, just so our life, heart, time, and money, seeks to occupy the unnatural vacuity that life sometime presents with the constant shifting tides of relationships. I think in popular terms this phenomenon of occupation in relationships is called ”moving on.”

Very often, out of that guilt and obligation we struggle to retain a place for the other person, to ”be there for them” when they return; religious adherents refer to this as ”forgiveness;” but what is this forgiveness all about, and who are we to adjudicate, or to even bestow upon ourselves the ”power” of adjudication? And even so, the struggle is against our own inherent human proclivities, it is not against our volitional will that we battle. Indeed, what we desire and seek is harmony and homeostasis, but, in the words of Shakespeare: ”’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished,” but yet it is a consummation that will remain only a wish, as alas! its mere life is destined to be slaughtered in birth.

Homeostasis exists only in the forests where the sannysin dwells, and in the numenon where the philosopher muses and prattles and plays, and under the bhodi tree where the yogi revels in a trance. In reality, nothing remains in perfect balance, and imbalance brings with it the train of binary opposites of desire and distance, longing and resistance, humger and famine, pain and pleasure. And as the Vedas stipulates, the deva-asura war is the war between the mind’s sedulous adherence to probity and body’s capitulation to the temptation of desire and its train of evil; that inner war that makes the flowers wilt, and turns the sunny skies to dark clouds.