The Sweetest Things

“The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feel, duties at your hand, the path of Right just before you. Do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.” - Robert Louis Stevenson


STRANGE how we go through life in search of something we don’t really know what. Every so often, we miss the wood for the tree, or the tree for the forest, because we prefer to look at the big picture rather than the little snapshots that make up the grand mosaic of our existence.

We crave for the glorious pie in the sky and ignore the scent of fresh bread baking in the oven. We obsess about ivory towers and overlook our roots, maybe in fear that they will forever haunt us. We fixate on getting the corner office and neglect the nooks and crannies of our personal comfort zone.

Perhaps for the reason that early on, we were told to aim for the moon. Reach for the stars, conquer the world. Should we live our parents’ dream or should we follow our own road? We grow up, and we make our choices - good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, instinctive or ridiculous, enlightened or unwise.

As adults, we were admonished to think big, act big. Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing! We become single-minded in our goal to succeed – at all costs, come what may, whatever the consequences, damn the torpedoes, if it is to be it is up to me. In the process, we turn out to be like zombies somnambulating through the concrete jungle, or androids springing to animation at the push of a button.

Eventually, we end up not far removed from the commodities we trade in the market. Or the mean machine that churns out the perfect assembly line. Equipped with skills, but lacking in sensibility. Gifted with brains, but wanting in sentiment. Intricately packaged, but missing in value. All form, less substance. Hot air, no warmth.

Have we gone so far up the ladder or wide across the horizon that we don’t anymore feel the least emotion on what we have done or what we have become? Do we still recognize our own uniqueness as an individual or do we see ourselves as just another product on a shelf? Do we look at ourselves as a human being with a set of values or as a human resource with a set of abilities? To be sold or bought, as it were, according to what are puffed on the label or declared on the curriculum vitae.

It doesn’t help, either, that crass materialism and wanton commercialism have become the prevalent norms by which lifestyles are set or measured. In today’s world, having enough is never enough. There is always room for another car in the garage. The cell phone has too few add-ons. The living room TV set is not fashionably thin. The laptop has got to be an Apple. Xbox is the new toy. The iPod has a new version. Play Station has a new incarnation. Europe is passé.

We put out all the stops in keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak, much better if we put one over them. We bend over backwards in trying to outdo ourselves, or to outmaneuver the pretentious bloke drooling over the coveted post. We make a huge effort to make even the most trifling thing happen if only to feed our fantasies, assuage our fears or knead our oftentimes bloated egos.

Success!, or the sweet smell of it, makes us want to keep on plodding for more. If you look up, there are no limits! Don’t stop till you drop in exhaustion. Winners never quit. Quitters never win. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Chances are, all chances will be taken – to get the extra mile or drink the extra bubbly; to dip our fingers on the caviar or soak our feet in the hot tub; to be king-of-the-hill, head-of-the-list, cream-of-the-crop, top-of-the-heap!

Looking out for number one isn’t such an off-putting thing, however. It is in making it the end-all and be-all of our existence that can inebriate, confound, stupefy, befuddle us to bits and pieces until we don’t know much of ourselves any longer. The heady brew of conquest has a way of shifting the balance, tilting the scales, lifting our chins up up and away, leaving us dreamier and hungrier, doubly insatiable, twice as unquenchable.

And we forget the little things that made our eyes sparkle in expectation during the wonder years. We conveniently relegate to oblivion the diffident manner with which we pandered to simple pleasures. We consign to the dustbins of our past the small victories we picked up on our way to the top, preferring to wallow in the luxuries and vagaries of the moment.

Consequently, much of the beautiful music within us remains unsung for the longest time, unheard and un-played and wasted to eternity. Much of the joyous rhythms that nourish the soul stay unshared with the persons near and dear to us, tattered as we are from the wear and tear of fighting tooth and nail for what we have and still must have. Most of the time, we just touch and go, hit and run, sink or swim, take it or leave it.

No, we don’t stop to smell the flowers, that’s too cliché. We don’t look up at the night sky and wish upon a falling star, that’s too juvenile. We don’t thump our chest over a game of scrabble or pump our fist after fluffing up the perfect pancake, that’s too blasé. We don’t take long walks at the beach or watch the sun go up and down, that’s too much waste of precious time.

Neither do we make an effort to know the person behind the handshake, seeing them only as the entity that signs on the dotted line or the face that goes with the soon-forgotten name. Old friends? They are mere entries in our phone books, if not hazy pictures from ancient history, that we go back to only when the need arises or the opportunity presents itself. Most of the people who walk in and out of our lives are merely fleeting shadows that we don’t allow to leave footprints in our hearts, washed away from our dreariness like sifting sands along unlamented shores.

And what of the thrill we used to get out of solving crossword puzzles, gazing at ships dropping anchor, feeding stray cats and dogs, having a good cry from watching a mushy movie or reading Les Miserables, pigging out on ice cream and mud pie, whistling a tune in the dark, climbing trees and picking up seashells, walking in the rain with the one we love…

They are now just misty water colored memories of the way we were, aren’t they. Sad, how we’ve drifted so far away from the odds and ends that made us whole. Sadder still that we continue to trudge on - sans emotional entanglement, without jubilation or trepidation. The tragedy being, that this so-called life does not let us savor the fruits of our labors, no more than slither through them, and we die without having truly lived.