THE SENSE OF PURPOSE
I once asked the then Chairman and Managing Director of one of India ’s largest banks (Bank of India), “What is your tip on time-management?” Shri K V Krishnamurthy replied, “Be business-like in your meetings with all your visitors.” The language used sounds terse but the meaning essentially is spiritually sound. Saving time or any other form of valuable resource is possible when we stay with the sense of purpose. In the Mahabharata, Ekalavya symbolizes total commitment to purpose. Even when he was rejected by Dronacharya, the teacher of archery whom he had sought with all his heart, he did not lose heart. He practiced the difficult art all by himself in the forest and rose to great heights of mastery over it. He did not allow any distraction to weaken his learning activity.
In daily life, we need to be aware of how we waste our energies in myriad ways. If only we watch just our speech, we shall find that our tongue roams in unnecessary domains. What is worse, we say things that lead to spoiled relationships. If we exercise enough responsibility when we converse with people, there will be much more peace and harmony in our lives. Moderation in speech, observes Vimala Thakar, is a way to conserving mental energy. Of course, no suppression is meant here. The economy of speech is brought about rather through right understanding born of vigilance.
Disorder thrives on lack of care. There is a lot of chaos in the life of even the rich and the famous, of the eminent and in that of even the celebrities. Hardly anyone pauses to examine life. All are carried away by the powerful eruptions of their old, hidden, habitual tendencies. Much glory comes to them incidentally and thanks to a certain talent in a specific area, while the whole of life is vastly bigger than the area of their expertise. No wonder we very often find well-known personalities of the world confessing how lost and lonely they feel. Some of them go guru-hunting also, which may or may not help.
The purpose of life itself is hardly clear to anybody. A lot of things that we do in life are all the result of some inner unrest rather than of clarity of purpose. An elderly man once asked a youth, “Why did you marry?” and the young fellow said honestly, “What else to do?” When we look back at our years, we realize how often we had acted impulsively, without giving thought to the matter. Someone ruefully remarked, “Youth is a time to err and old age a time to repent.”
Some examples in history are inspiring where certain men staid focused on a chosen purpose to such an extent that an external force or event could not do much to distract them. The following instance is almost humorous too. During a fiery political speech at Ennis, Eamon De Valera (1882 – 1975), who would become Ireland ’s longtime president and prime minister, was arrested. Released after a year of imprisonment, he hastened back to Ennis, called a meeting and began, “As I was saying when I was interrupted…. “ However, the clarity of purpose and the commitment to it that we are considering here are of a higher order than a mere attachment to a cause.
Hope lies in the fact that great intelligence lies within every one of us, which is usually veiled by a maze of thoughts born of ignorance. In the act of careful self-observation, many unconstructive or unhelpful thoughts get exposed; they die away and then the clear stream of reason from within us can find its way. We must train ourselves to weed out such useless (or even harmful) movements of our mind and stay focused on things that are worthwhile. Listening carefully to our own conscience, and respecting universal values like truth and non-injury, we can bring our mind (and ourselves) back on right tracks and live in much peace, love and joy.
Rabindranath Tagore, in his Gitanjali1, prays to the Lord to help his country stay out of the ‘dreary desert sand of dead habit’. He asks God to keep him in a little of fetters whereby he is bound by the Lord’s will, and the Lord’s purpose is carried out in his life. The poet clarifies that the fetters are no other than the chains of God’s love for the devotee. We thus see that there is a way of living where our purpose is well-aligned with the Almighty’s and where we put in our effort in gentle submission to His will.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi
Footnote 1: Gitanjali: Poems 34 and 35.