Writing Feedback / Ships Ahoy -- floundering marriages [25]

It is not hard to see things the way I am wanting you to see them.

Imagine a cluster of ships, sailing on turbulent waters. Our marriages are these ships and frankly, some of them are listing -- which means, they are tilting and having difficulty moving forward; some others are also beginning to show signs of the same.

When we look around, we see other clusters, families; the ships within them mostly sailing upright, or like ours, floundering. It is a fact that the seas are choppy, turbulent and going is rough; but we admire those clusters where the ships are doing alright inspite of the condition of the water. Naturally we wonder about them and think that there must be a good guiding person or persons, or that they must know some principles of sailing that is helping them thrive and surge on.

Like I said these ships are our individual marriages and the turbulent waters, the environment we must sail through. The question is what are we all doing wrong and have no common knowledge of ?

First what is the turbulence ? This is the new freedom which women in India have discovered. One could say that this is itself not the turbulence, but in some fashion it is creating a turbulence in the waters. It would be wrong to ask women to go back to the earlier ways of being uneducated and lacking the earning power. The problem is really the lack of the guiding principles which tell them as they attain this power to earn, of what can go wrong. A sense of the larger picture.

What they do not know, or appreciate completely, is the vastness, and the desolateness of the ocean -- of the life ahead. I have seen the same thinking in many instances to recognize it as a common mistaken notion and the danger of taking this course.

Why point the finger at women and not the men ? Because in this regard, for men, little has changed from what was earlier . They had all this freedom, to be educated, to earn; it is only for the women that this is changed so dramatically in recent times.

The question for women is -- once you do willingly accept a man as your husband, why do you still consider yourself as an independent person? Because the man by tradition accepts the matrimonial bond completely, and the person his wife is.

But the woman soon finds faults in the man, maybe because now she works closely with others, or is it because she imagines that as she now has an independent earning, she is capable of sailing along even without the man. And thinks to herself that what had kept women subjugated in earlier times was not having an independent source of income. Even though this is hardly how the man would have thought, or taken advantage of except in rare cases.

So mostly the woman just imagines her lot as of one suppressed and now finally she has freed herself. Then pushing along this line of thought further she begins to imagine her husband as actually oppressing her and thinks the more she frees herself from him the better will her lot be. So she starts to imagine a life, with herself and her son or another child, and the man she was married to is taken out of the picture entirely.

There is a dangerous fallacy in this thinking, yet women are doing exactly this, and we can see what the outcome has been for them.

Where did things go wrong ? From the time when after marriage they did not commit to their bond. Instead chose the slippery slope of tasting an over-abundance of independence.

What they missed to see is that society is man made, I should say man-and-woman made. Therefore it's values are worldly, that is, they will be self-preserving and self-perpetuating. If you do not do the acceptable thing you are at the mercy of the waters beneath and all that lurks there. Once you have made a matrimonial pact, you need to move to the next stage. Of preserving that, of doing everything you can to hold it together. It becomes your prime purpose and duty. Men have accepted this fact, and more naturally accept their marriage, quickly moving into the next stage of nourishing the family and protecting and sheltering it.

Rajiv

Writing Feedback / The world is like a painting, our existence the penciled outlines and our lives.. [8]

I read somewhere: the world is like a painting, our existence the penciled outlines and our lives the coloring. The canvas, the substratum everything is painted upon.

Sitting in any group of people we begin to see ourselves as different, not so much by physical characteristics, but something that appears more fundamental. If we were sitting say with a group of villagers. They may not differentiate so much between us and someone else of similar background. But what is this background, do we see it the same as others see it ?

Whatever it is, the background seems first, a consequence of what our parents were. We carried it forward, gradually making choices ourselves: our occupation, friends, people, surroundings. Ultimately, did we become as we wanted to be? No. Wouldn't you agree ?

For we're free to choose how to act, but we live with the consequences. For every act of ours, something more than our own actions makes the result. We try taking these extraneous factors into account, attempting to control the outcome. Is it only a matter then of time and experience before we gain control of our life?

By the time we learn enough though, our life moves on. We're different players, and the rules of the game are changed for us. In this time, our background has begun to form; a coloring within the outlines in the painting, visible to anyone who cares to look.

How would we want our color to be ? There is no good answer except that since we're in the game, and a part of this painting for reasons we have no idea about. We'd best do what we can to move this game on. Not be the one to attract attention or concern of whatever the larger cause of this whole play is.

Is there lying in the hollow of our minds something predetermined about us. Inevitably making our fates ?
And our free will? Isn't that about a freedom to listen to our own minds, sometimes sound and sometimes just whimsical?

Thank you