“HOW ARE YOU?”
How many times we are asked this question? Innumerable, uncountable, may be the maximum number of times.
It’s so common to ask this question. Sometimes we don’t even feel that it’s a question.
“I’m good”, “I’m doing good”, “I’m OK”, “I’m fine” etc.
Our answers are so simple, so quick in general to be honest.
Can we even imagine that a simple question – “How are you?” has the power to change our life?
In a phone call, my best friend asked me this question and for the first time I said – “I don’t know”.
That one question completely changed my insight as soon as I took a pause to give an authentic answer that “I don’t know”.
This triggered the quest inside me to find answer to this very question. And I can tell you this is the most valuable and exciting quest of my life. May be the ultimate quest of life. Everyday I’m learning and realizing my own self. Upanishad says “Aham Brahasmi” – “I’m absolute”. Yes, I believe that this quest, this journey will drive us to realize that we are absolute.
Let’s have the journey together, a quest for life time.
To answer this question, first we need to get closer to “You”. It is true that most of us don’t know ourselves. As a result we always falter to give answer to this question.
From the day of our birth, someone has given us our name, someone gave us our food, we have learned the language from our surroundings and as we grew we took all the inputs from society we belonged to. All of these unknowingly shaped our likes and our dislikes. At every stage of our life, from childhood to teenage to working life to family life we have taken inputs and have turned into man or woman of our name or fame. In stages of our life we have experienced happiness and sadness in cycles and always tried to cling into happiness. But unfortunately we have all experienced this happiness is not ever last. It comes and goes. We relentlessly run behind happiness. If we try to find out, we can easily see that everything is changing and so is our likes, dislikes and their results – happiness and sadness. If my likes, dislikes are changing and my thoughts are changing along with my environment, surrounding people then is it not true that this me, this so called you is also getting changed. Yes this “you” is changing with time, from baby to toddler to schoolgoer to teenager to adult and so on.