Nothing Lasts Forever

 Living in the limelight is exciting, but it is fraught with the liability of losing all that a celebrity has got accustomed to, and perhaps learnt to expect as his right. Call it the law of opposites or the law of physics, the fact is that what goes up has to come down. And, so, while a man is at the peak of his period of glory, he should remember that this period will not last forever; a time will come when he will be confronted with his vulnerability and his inability to sustain this acme of fame and good fortune. Rudyard Kipling understood and expressed the need for detachment in the poem: “If ”. The poem is steeped in philosophy, and the lines that have become memorable for sportspersons are the ones that are etched at the entrance to Wimbledon, “To meet triumph and disaster and treat the two impostors the same.” The Vipassana meditation programme explains the need for detachment when students are asked to chant the message of impermanence, “Anicca, anicca, anicca”, at the end of every round of meditation. The Gita embodies this message throughout, with Krishna explaining to Arjuna that change is the law of life. “What have you lost, that you are weeping? What have you brought, that you have lost? What have you made, that has been destroyed? You brought nothing. What you have, you got from here. What was given was given here. You have come empty-handed and shall go empty-handed. What is yours today was somebody else’s in the past and will be somebody else’s in the future. You think it is yours and are deeply engrossed in it.

Source: Economic Times, 7/03/2019