To have or not to have? : Blog # 147

To have or not to have?

        We all have wants, wishes and whims. It can be fame, money, love, success or anything that is appealing about this life on earth. Some of them are met and some aren’t. But I often wonder which is more painful, to have and lose or not to have at all. There are multiple human sensibilities at work here.         

  

            When one doesn’t get what one wants, one can rely on imagination. We can think if we had what we wanted, we would do this or that. Also, hope comes to one’s rescue too. We can always wish for the elusive want to happen to us. This hope and imagination fuels our journey with enough optimism to sail through.

It might also happen so that one longs for something and doesn’t achieve it even after a long time. Then what happens? Fortunately, we humans are equipped with enough spirit in us that we learn to live with that reality and begin to look at other wishes to be pursued.

But what happens when you are given a taste of your want and then it is taken away?  I think that is a deceitful manifestation of cruelty. Letting one know what it feels like to have something one always wanted and then taking it away is like twisting the destiny. Here, only disappointment remains. Yes, one can always argue there is reminiscence. But what is reminiscence here but a romanticized disappointment?

I think what would be most painful is the sense of loss. The umpteen rethinks that goes in about what could have been done to retain it. Did one take it too lightly or way too seriously? Was it because it came by too easily or was it due to it happening too early? There is this thought as to what can be done to bring it back. Even if tried, will it come back at all? The urge to get it back is always there at the back of one’s mind.

May be, this question of whether to have and lose it or not have it at all belongs right in the middle of those ever elusive quests of Life that we have to learn to live with.

Arun Babu

Tweet