Rebirth and partial lives
I have thought of rebirth quite a few times. But wait, not in the normal sense in which its usually meant. I’m not talking of another life after this one, or the one you had before this one(maybe you were an ant 
). I’m talking of rebirths in this life.
Like when my friend Jhawa recently dozed off for a brief minute while driving on a highway(the “minute” must be a random guess, of course). When he woke up he was in the middle of 2 lanes. I have no doubt that the guy behind him must have freaked out. I think he had a rebirth right then. He could have been potentially killed, yet luckily nothing happened. Isn’t that a reason to start living life the way you want to?
So recently I was reading this book called Oracle Night in which the protagonist discovers the manuscript of a novel called oracle night(confused?). In the novel within a novel, a man is walking from his house to a supermarket close by one fine day. With very precise timing, a slab that has been a part of the building definitely for a while we assume, decides to come crashing down around the corner just a hair breadth’s away from his face. Convinced that it was death that he just escaped, he realises this has to be a total rebirth for him. Instead of walking back home he keeps walking on. He can see how his current life totally sucks. So he goes to the airport, and takes the first flight out, which happens to be going to Kansas city.
The story goes on, but I have found myself thinking how often we lead unfulfilling lives. Naipaul did a story called Half a Life on this theme. We actually happen to be fuller versions of the life that most of us don’t live.
My past life comes to mind(back on the time scale, not a previous life)!. I was in college and got very ill. I thought I’d die . And I started thinking of the life I was leading. I was not satisfied with the way my college education was going. And I was spending most of my time fretting over it and remaining not satisfied. I was wasting my life.
So I asked myself what is one of the most well known questions. What if I were to die tomorrow? Would I be happy with how I was dealing with life? Not what life was dealing to me(which for a large measure would be my own doing anyways), but was I really responding to whatever was going on in my life in a way that I’d really like if I thought about it?
I couldn’t figure out a whole lot even after that experience, and it hasn’t made me a Buddha. But I had some thoughts that have definitely changed the way I live life on an everyday basis. I decided I’d rather die happy, irrespective of whats happening to me or around me. Be it the unhappiest or cruelest of circumstances, I was not going to waste any part of my life being unhappy. Not that I am a brooding types anyways, I’m rather known for grins, but I wasn’t going to let anything bother me.
And from this has flowed a happiness that I had never experienced before. The ulimate reality, of our mortality. Knowing that almost everyone alive now will be dead in a hundred years, that the cute little toddler we see learning to walk will have spent his/her innings and have merged with nature in the next hundred and fifty years. None of the current pool will be alive. People will have mated with others, almost in a slow Brownian motion movement(fewer collisions though – lesser children, maybe a lot more for a small number of people) and left behind a fresher, fitter population. The cycle of life and death is definitely the beauty of life. And thus, when you come to think of it, death is a wonderful recycle bin of nature, except that you don’t have the ‘restore’ option unlike MS windows . Its more like Unix where a delete is a definite delete.
So given such a short, and utterly unpredictable lifespan, what can we do? Well, live life as best we can, and maybe even lend someone a helping hand once in a while. After all I could be the one needing that hand. It takes absolutely no time for a large grand lifestyle to take a U turn into destitution.
Living happily in the *present* is one of the really few things I have really learnt so far in life. My thinking is best expressed by the eternally elegant lines of Bachchan:
Chhote se jeevan mein kitna
pyaar karoon, pee loon haala
aane ke hee saath jagat mein
kehlaya, jaane wala
Swaagat ke hee saath vida kee
hoti dekhi tayyari
band lagi hone khulte hee
meri jeevan, madhushala.
let me make an attempt at an english translation:
In this short life,
how much do I love?
how much wine do I drink?
Right since landing
into this world,
having been called one who’ll go away one day.
Seen the preparation
for my departure
right along the preparations for my welcome.
The winery of my life
had started closing
right when it opened.
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Bahut accha hai……
too good!.. mere man ki baat likh dali