"There will be days that will come to you as teachers. You can sit at their feet and learn how this universe moves on indifferent to your grief and your problems and all the million other worries that weigh your head down. It may be the day of your greatest grief, your greatest loss and you may see the world engulfed by a ravenous darkness. You may think this is the end of the world and the sun is never going to rise again. But dawn will break at the appointed hour and the sun will rise in all its accustomed resplendent glory.The winds will blow, kissing green grass, or brown as the case may be, as usual. Venus will hover above Moon, or Moon hang from Venus, just as it would have had nothing happened to you. There will be no earthquakes, no volcanoes will blast open the earth, no tempests will disturb the oceans, and even the cock in your village will crow at the usual hour. So much for the grandeur of the tragedy of Son of God - or his joy and glory.
But bend, then, your frame and lower your ear to hearken the beat in the heart of a cat who has just seen her kitten gasp to death before her eyes, or the oxe that has wounds cut deep into his nape by human cruelty, or to the tree felled by the last night's storm, or to the rose plant rendered bare by flowers plucked from it by some wanton school children. Or look , if you can, into the eyes of a goat being taken to a slaughter house or at the frightened face of a rat crouching , frozen in fear, at the sight of the approaching cobra. Consider all this, and consider a cow whose calf is writhing in some unknown pain before her eyes. Consider this, and then look towards the Sun or the Moon or the Venus or the Oceans or the Winds or the volcanoes. They still move in supreme indifference to all this sorrow, as they do to all the laughter and fun that Nature revels in on a different day.
What do you do then when grief and sorrow and a million other worries weigh you down?
Turn away from yourself and laugh and joke and giggle and gossip and run or jump or play hide and seek with kids in the town. Play the rope-skip with village girls or run on sand with urchins who know no worries other than hunger and physical pain. Turn away from yourself. Simply turn away.
Suddenly the clown in Nature or God will reveal Himself to you and reveal to you the supreme truth. Your grief is as petty as your bliss. Move beyond both,and consider the profile of a saint as a clown. When nothing else works - and nothing else ever does, except for those who love self-deception but anyway, When nothing else works laugh without reason, act without motive. Stop taking yourself seriously. Get tired and go to sleep. God will reveal Himself to you as a little mouse peeping through the chinks of your door. You might find it too un-sublime but God or Truth or Universe feel no obligation to appear sublime to you. As Namdev said, the elephants and the insect both mirror God.Not that they are, but they are. Just as you are. Laugh with the insect or bow before the elephant , or bow before the insect and laugh with the elephant - Nature will bow with you and laugh with you regardless.
But remember, Nature is not here to echo your notes of grandeur; it has work to do. The sun is not here to seek a mist to hide behind to keep you company when you are broken with grief.The Sun has work to do. The Moon will never know you lost a leg or have developed a disease that will never cure. The Moon has work to do. The cat and the cow and the dog and elephant and even the trees and plants in your village may be too arrogant to notice your sorrow. They have work to do. Everyone, everything has work to do.
But yes, if you seek their company, you can try this. Love them and laugh at and with them - at the trees, at the Moon, at the Sun, the crow, the calf, the cow , or just a grain of sand - everyone. Be their mate, or play-act as one. May be, they will laugh with you or run a little race with you for fun. And even if they don't, you will still be happy. Your love will lit some dark corners in your soul; even your empty laughter, just giggles, may get a cat interested and that might give you happiness. Be a clown to a cat or to a mouse.Be a clown to the SUn , to the Moon, to the sand, to the sea. The clown alone is the saint, for he alone knows - or knows how to pretend to know - that being happy without reason is the only way to be religious, for it is the only way to mock your paranoid concerns and the only way to be grateful without expressing it in a formal prayer.
All else is mere hypocritical wisdom, a mirror image of your exalted self-love."
He looked at the forest and he heard it laugh . At him? He couldn't tell. But for a moment, a smile falshed across his lips."The rascal," he almost said, but kept quite. The words started echoing in his mind, eahc word resembled a laughter.
This was enough to see him through the day ,laughing with people whom he hadn't talked to for ages. At the end of the day, his mind got tired of laughing and when he looked in the mirror above the wash-basin, he saw and heard a jester laugh uncontrollably at him. He couldn't but laugh back, even though it made him feel so insignificant, and even though somehting in him still said, "You are sad today.". Feeling insignificant also made him feel "non-responsible" ( irresponsible, he thought , was not the right word, for it still implied some responsibility, which implied fake sense of self-importance). Feeling non-responsible made him feel light. Feeling non-responsible also releived him of the huge task of writing on Facebook about a legend who had died that day. He joked -without knowing it, or without realising it at least -even about the legend: his wife and women. Tired as he was - for the first time in life, he had realised that the energy sapped in living up to expectations was physical - he felt sleepy and staggered toward his bed. He forgot where he was, but it didn't even seem to matter. This was the house of the one man whom he had truly loved all his life( or what seemed like all his life) , and who had truly loved him all his life. It didn't matter that the man was also his boss. But the boss had always behaved like a beloved and he had also learnt to teae and trouble him. This was one warm feeling he had, nbefore he laughed at himself for the feeling and at himself and his 'beloved' . He threw his head on the pillow, and it sounded like a wooden log. And It would be eternity before he would want to wake up. He smiled, almost laughed, at himself and closed his eyes. Outside his window, twilight still lingered, having one last look at the receding hemisphere before it.
