Where Are You When You’re in the Middle of Nature?

 

 
WHILE the summer is here, one cannot fail to notice how much sensory, imaginative and spiritual reward it offers and that too without any price or requiring us to make any strenuous effort. Think of thousands of people who flock the Sea to Sky from all corners of the world spending huge amounts of money, just to enjoy nature which is free of cost to us, the locals. All we have to do is to be present—fully present— to enjoy the bounty of nature. But it seems we are unable to even do that.  

Today, technology has colonised our time and mind so much that we are unable to be fully present anywhere—we are not with our loved ones fully when we are with them; we cannot make ourselves fully available to nature while we are bang in the middle of it; heck, we can’t even finish a book in one sitting! There is always a mobile phone with us as a wall between us and the rest of the world—as if it has become our cocoon (ironically, it purports to put us in close touch of people!). Mobile phone keeps us forever absent from wherever we are present. It is a permanent alibi. It has fragmented our existence so much that we are unable to even perceive ourselves as coherent, unified wholes. 

The market likes this state of affairs. While we are unable to concentrate on anything for long or devote ourselves fully to anything, we become soft targets for the bombardment of messages from the world of business and commerce. We become vulnerable to the advertisement spiels and the illusory world of the image that offers satiety but ends up increasing our appetite. The deceptive world of modern communication has divided ourselves so that we are broken away from our traditional communities.

The modern independent individual is a big lie. We are never independent—when we are independent of society or family we are dependent on something else. Individuality is mostly a myth, for a seemingly free individual is a construct of so many new social and economic phenomenon.

The modern fragmented, distracted, distant individual may achieve excellence in a trade, profession or skill, but she gets diminished as a human being. When we break away from age-old rhythms of nature and align ourselves with the hum of the industrial and commercial world, we deny our ancient spiritual linkages with plants, animals, and elements. We secede from the endlessly beautiful world of nature that has been our mainstay for millions of years. And surprisingly, all this happens while we live in the middle of it all.