விசர் கூத்து !

I don’t know why some things people do appear to me as ‘mad dance’.

We all do have pet peeves.There is nothing wrong with having an opinion about something. It is part of being a human, part of living in a society sharing the same time and space with fellow humans.

I couldn’t put a finger on the reasons some actions of others go beyond the level of pet peeves and are labeled inside my head as ‘mad dance’. If I have to explain it to someone about a specific incident, if I think hard enough, I could find a specific reason why I think it’s a ‘mad dance’.

However, I wonder if there is an overarching theme in the internal thought process to view some things as ‘mad dance’. 

As humans we need food, shelter, health, safety and caring relationships to live a fulfilling life. If you pick a random person from any part of the world and ask what he/she needs, the answer would be one or combination of those above. Let’s call it the basic needs. 

We go to work, we put up with the nonsense of other people, we waste our time stuck in traffic, we study, we migrate;  in essence we spend more than one third of our lives to get the means to obtain the basic needs of life. 

Regardless of our effort, not all of us are lucky enough to get the basic necessities of life. Billions of decent normal people in the world are struggling hard to live a decent healthy life. 

Some are quite lucky at birth; they are blessed with good health, wealthy parents, good looks and a stable prosperous country. Those who are not lucky enough, we have to struggle hard to get the best out of this short life. What we experience in life is part of what we get at birth and part of what we decide to do with whatever we are given. 

Life’s outcomes are dictated by the accumulation of the small choices we make each day. 

A teenager from a middle class family decides to smoke at an early age and later in life fails to land a high paying job.  He will struggle a lot in his mid life to support his expensive addiction; feeding his addiction while supporting a family and dealing with the health issues arising from smoking is not going to make your life fun. 

At that time when he started smoking, it was just a small decision whether to submit himself to peer pressure or not. He, nor the friend who pressured him to take the first puff, wouldn’t have realized how costly that small decision would have been in the future. 

That teenager wasn’t having fun when he took that first puff, what he was doing is விசர் கூத்து, a mad dance. A foolish act considering his situation, his capability and his potential for a better future. An act set him on a path of pain for the rest of his life. 

Actions we take, decisions we make; not all of them are clear enough at first sight to be labeled as ‘mad dance’. Some of them may look perfectly innocent, some of them trick your mind to think it is a perfectly normal thing to do, some of them are already a norm in the circle you interact with. But it will set you up on a path that will not help you in any way living a fulfilling life. 

When someone is blessed with everything, they have a larger room to make mistakes. They can abuse drugs, they can fool around with other people, they can be arrogant and ignore good advice since they have the means to support their flawed life. 

Majority of us are not like that, if we want to get the best out of this life, we need to have the attitude of a disciplined soldier. Because our mind is an imperfect machine, it’ll make you fall into traps that will alter your course of life. The tamil saying, மனம் ஒரு குரங்கு, perfectly illustrates this.

We should know what differentiates having fun with setting foot on a trap. Life is short. Don’t fall into the traps set by your mind. 

விசர் கூத்து ஆடாமல் try your best to live life to the fullest