A deeper look at how playing safe, following rules, and avoiding mistakes can quietly disconnect you from a life that actually feels like your own.
Humanity is in grim danger. And the danger is not the war for the flu or any threats to life. We walk on the path, and we are expected to walk on the road that is safe. Our parents waste all their lives just to put us on the path they once walked. An old path, so much old that the land has become barren and no new flower grows there. The real danger humanity faces is to walk the path of normality. Being correct is being rude to life. Because life is not correct. Life is not a format. Life is spontaneous, life is fragile, and that makes it beautiful. If you guardrail it with your ego, it not only gets trapped, but it loses its lustre, no matter how delicate it is in the winds of the mountain. And this is the inherent nature of our being—to live. And if you’re not living, it makes you uncomfortable. It pushes you into wishes, into a circle of wants and desires. It induces a chronic habitual tendency to gain instant gratification. But the real problem is often ignored, because we are so busy working on the path that we only scratch the surface of our problems and never take a deep dive into them.
To live a life is to understand that learning to live is learning to make mistakes. You would have never walked on your own feet if you were afraid of making mistakes. Your success to work on your own is the outcome of a series of mistakes. We want to make mistakes, but we are told not to make mistakes. In that way, we are all criminals, we are all sinful. The greatest sin exists because a rule exists saying that doing so and so is a sin. The whole question of morality and ethics is no longer personal. It is given into the hands of gatekeepers—people who never miss the chance to exercise power and put their authority on display in the name of morality and ethics. Who wrote these rules? Who made these disciplines? Why are you told that you’re going to have these rules when you are going to be born? Were you aware that you were about to enter a world where your decisions would not be in your hands? I doubt you were. And so you decided to take birth as a free man, as a free child with free innocence. And your innocence was corrupted by the rules and regulations this society has imposed on everybody. They want to herd. Everybody knows how to live, but nobody knows how to die. Learning to live is learning to make mistakes, knowing that life is preparation for death. So if you want your life to conclude in a peaceful and blissful way, then your attempt should be a foot forward—not wasting time on making life and living right, but to prepare for death and what lies beyond it. But here is the catch—this is not the death you think it is. This is the death before you die—a death which frees you from the cycle of life and death itself.
Most people are afraid of death. People who are afraid to die are also the people who are afraid to live. Because they live in cautiousness. Their every step is measured. Their every decision is calculated. They are not humans. They are machines—conditioned, controlled, and engineered to work in certain patterns. They are always protecting something, and that something is always something that is not permanent—the degree, the job, the marriage, the family life, the social structure, everything. If you spend life protecting it, is it more precious than life itself? And if you think that living life is protecting all this, are you really living your life? Nobody asks this question. Because the quest to find the answer to this question is never-ending. Questioning the way we live—because nobody dares to find the answer for how to live by our own rules. They spend all their lives living by rules written by someone else. But they never question—is there something else, another way for life to be lived? The fact is, there is no rule. And this fact is more uncomfortable and sounds more dangerous than having any kind of rule.
With rules, you can expect predictable outcomes. The future is not predictable, but you can at least predict that you will be sad or happy about the outcome. Without rules, you are on your own. You are not given a script—whether to laugh, cry, or shout looking at the outcome of your endeavour. But that’s the real wind in your sails. You are moving towards unknown waters, uncharted territories anyway. Life doesn’t go the way you have decided. You can’t change the future. You can’t predict the future. You can’t live the future right now. It is about to come, and it will come when it is supposed to come. You can’t accelerate it, and you can’t avoid it either. Without external rules, you are the most important person in your life. It has to be like that. It has to become like that. Because when the question arises to question the established norms and conditions of society, you become a seeker. And a seeker has to start with himself—has to put himself first. In this way, he is selfish. Because he wants to experience the good, the bad, the ugly on his own. And he wants to be the first one to experience it. No longer seeing the second-hand experience of other people—of how to praise the sunrise, how to appreciate a film, or how to enjoy just sitting in the garden. The weight of pretentious knowing becomes heavier the longer you hold it. You have to put it down someday. This weight is this sort of knowledge and clarity that you think you have in your life. But this knowledge and clarity are nothing else but a recipe for disappointment.
You understand this when a teacher sends you back to yourself, and you grasp that what isn’t meant for you will disappoint you until you understand. If you get what you want, life will become boring. Everybody would be a king, and everybody would be beautiful within conventional norms. Final society would win to brace its dominance over people, because there would be no different person left in the world. There would be no exceptions. There would be no doubts. And there would be no questions about what reality really means. So the goal of life is not to become a fish in the school, but to become the unknown flower hidden in the unknown valley—so beautiful that it is contained and consumed by its own beauty. No one to appreciate it. No eyes to spoil it. And yet it stands in dignity and grace, flaunting its fragility and innocence. When you realise that you are beautiful in your own way, you have won the game. The real joy of love is not to find someone like you, but to find yourself. That is the love you have been waiting for eons. Meet yourself—that is the real cremation. That is where you disappear. That is where the divine takes over, and you create with the benevolence of the good. You die to the mundane, never to be born again, and never to die again.
What remains is life without you. What remains is living without a life. What remains is only living—you become the living itself. Not even you interfere with the relation you have with yourself. This is the ultimate death—the death of ego. You realise normality may be comfortable, but no flower grows there. You accept that, rooted in yourself, neither absence nor presence disturbs your peace. You come back knowing that, like art, others’ perceptions of you are just interpretations. You surround yourself with people who feel like sunshine, and you speak kindly—knowing it helps life grow. Now, your next move matters more than your last mistake, and you move the way love makes you move, because poetry, beauty, romance, and love are what we stay alive for.