GIVE UP
By Arun Babani
If you’re 20, plan to give up. If you’re 30, hasten to give up soon. If you’re 40, give up now. If you’re 50, why haven’t you given up yet? If you’re 60, oh you’ll never give up.
Give up believing yourself to be the center of the universe. Give up thinking you are not alone because you ARE, absolutely and totally alone, responsible for your yet unfinished life. Give up those unfulfilled dreams that you expect from yourself and your children. Give up living for tomorrow which never comes. It always comes as today while your eyes are fixed on yet another tomorrow. Give up this rubbish of hope and search for an evening filled with stars of your desires and an abundance of luck. Give up that silly ribbon you preserved after unfolding a valuable gift. Give up thinking of Municipality when you encounter garbage and urchins and stray dogs on the traffic signals. Give up thinking it is not your job to clean up the mess your ‘Me’ makes. Give up all of your junk jewelry that you picked up from the by lanes of the grey market which makes you look cheap and garish. Give up feeling sorry for yourself just because you’re not being noticed in your latest pair of branded jeans.
Give up envying the rich and pitying the poor because these are the tricks your ‘Maya’ plays on you. Understand that this universe is your sounding board. As you believe, so shall you see, a nursery lesson you seem to have ignored or given up quicker than necessary. Give up feeling awkward and looking confident in the same breath. Look; Listen; Watch; instead of wanting to be watched. Go to the unlikeliest of places to get an unlikely glimpse of life. Give up the routine, the machine, the cycle. Move out of the box. Give up the future where you will be on the top one day and the world will bow down to you. Give up these silly plans of standing upsidedown. They never work. Give up your thoughts. It’s the animal in you, the monkey, the ape. Thoughts create disharmony. Give up those nasty plans of one day I’ll be such and such, so and so and who’s who. Nobody is anybody and everybody is somebody. Make friends with yourself as you are today, now, this moment, this perfect moment which is you, the perfection. Give up running an extra mile to create an impression and above all, give up fooling yourself that you will live happily ever after!
I will tell you a secret. Be absolutely and severely real and the miraculous is just round the corner. Because when you give up the false, the true is discovered right underneath. So when you give up you become ready to receive. Give up so that you may be filled.