Pluralities

We have all heard about law of averages. Even the best of the teams cannot keep on winning all their games. When a team wins a few games on the trot, we generally start predicting their defeat in one of the next fixtures saying that law of averages will ensure that the team loses now. And this is true for almost everything concerning us and our lives! For example. a person like me usually gets two bouts of cold and flu in a year; if the second bout does not come for 6 months, the speculation starts and I start worrying about the next bout.

However, the problem arises when we expect consistency in the life that’s full of pluralities. We want each of our days to be filled with happiness. We want good jobs, regular promotions and increments, obedient children who are toppers in their schools and colleges, all respect and honour, loving and faithful spouse and all means of comforts.

When we do not get what’s expected by us, we ask, “why me?” We are never prepared to accept failures in our lives. While we hear stories of people getting affected by cancer day in day out, recently when we got a family member afflicted by this life threatening ailment, we asked, “why us?”. There’s another connotation of this “why me” conundrum – why not me? When our contemporaries or neighbours outshine us by making more money than us or creating bigger assets, we lament – why not me?

There’s beautiful thought that I received a couple of days ago in one of the groups in social media:

The world where we live is a world of pluralities.There will be happiness; there will be unhappiness.There will be good; there will be evil. All our suffering is because we expect consistency in the world of pluralities. We should not search peace outside in the world of pluralities; We need to search inside of us.