TO GROW OR TO SPREAD?

We might have got it all wrong. ‘To be or not to be?’ may not be the seminal question. The question is ‘to be here or not to be here?’. What’s ‘here’ though? ‘Here’ is no physical location. At least, not always. Instead, it is that point where we are in our lives currently. In fact, it is too many things that make up our present state of mind.

In my humble opinion, curiosity, above all, is the defining characteristic of human beings as species. How else do you think a species that originated in a remote part of Africa (or Europe, as some recent discoveries point to) ended up inhabiting whole of this humongous planet? What else explains the development of means of interplanetary travel by a species that at first didn’t even know what a wheel is? And so many times, it wasn’t even about physical exploration. When our ancestors couldn’t cover those distances of thousands of miles outside of them, they engaged with their thoughts and travelled millions of miles deep within their own selves to come out with thoughts that make up so much of philosophy as we know it today. We are curious and we have always been curious. We have always wanted to know what lies beyond the horizon and some of us were brave enough to explore. And it’s a result of those explorations that today we are what we are.

Not everybody explored, though. Some people just died curious, hoping for someone to find answers to the questions their minds were abuzz with. But those who did ended up changing the world in more ways than one.

The way life progressed, however, it became more and more sedentary as our ancestors chose to settle down. But the restlessness never went away despite ‘settling down’ becoming the norm. Nor did the desire to explore. And even today, we are divided into those who explore and those who don’t. This is where I would like to reiterate a point that I made above – that exploration isn’t always necessarily of physical terrains.

Wherever we are in our lives, the decision to move towards newer experiences and newer directions is in our hands, even when it doesn’t appear so in the presence of constraints of different nature surrounding us. But do we move? So many of us choose not to. We move but we just move ahead and not sideways because moving ahead with life comes naturally to us until death cuts it short. In other words, we decide to grow instead of spreading. And those are not merely important but life defining choices. So many of us slog day in day out in our lives to ‘grow’ in our jobs. So many of us hold on to relationships because that’s what relationships are meant to be done with. Most of us live all our lives at one place, without even thinking of living at any other place. All those are decisions that shape our lives.

But are those decisions that we truly make for ourselves? In so many cases, the answer is a ‘No’, guided by a world that sees order as more natural over chaos. I’m not here to make a judgement on which of the two leads to a better life, for those are individual discoveries to be made by those who make those decisions. Not every explorer who set out to discover new lands reached his destination. So many perished on the way. On the other hand, those who didn’t explore ended their lives only with dreams and imaginations of sights and lands that the explorers had the pleasure of discovering. Even in modern times, there are those who don’t wish to stick to one house, one job or even one relationship. They end up experiencing a range of emotions, terrains and experiences but often miss out on deeper connections that require time to develop.

The point I wish to drive home, or the thought that has taken over me off late, is that the real question of life is ‘To be here, or not to be here?’. All the answers to all other secondary questions flow from the answer to this.