Let life give new eyes to see old relationships – Wisdom on Wisdom 7

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents. And when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.
Russell Baker We all have a tendency to take the people around us for granted. Especially people who are in positions of authority and with whom we have an uneasy relationship. Quite often, we want to have as less to do with them as possible.
We just want to get our thing done and move on with our life. And this can have many unfortunate consequences because our relationships can be the source of the greatest stress for us. And if we are not careful about cultivating deep, meaningful relationships, then we deprive ourselves of one of the strongest sources of self-transformation.
We all have the potential to be much better than what we are presently. And what brings out that potential is often the inspiration, the encouragement, the guidance that we get from others. Without that guidance, we often remain shadows of ourselves.
And relationships can provide inspiration, guidance, transformation to the extent that they are deep. The relationships are only functional. Functional means when we want to do something practical, we interact with them.
When they want to do something for their functions, for their practical needs, they interact with us. And functional relationships are never fulfilling and they are rarely transformational. They are simply transactional.
Transactional means, just like if you go to a shop. When we go to that shop, we have certain transactions with the shopkeeper or the vendor over there. Now, our goal over there is not to develop a relationship with that person.
Our goal is simply to just get the thing done. Okay, I pay you this money and you give me this. So, transactional relationships are not at all fulfilling.
And the human heart longs for fulfillment. Now, probably the most difficult relationship after the spousal relationship, after the relationship between the husband and the wife is the relationship between parents and children. It’s a fundamental relationship for all of us.
We all, none of us, some of us may not marry, but all of us have parents. Now, we may not have, some of us may be orphans. In that sense, we don’t have parents.
But then someone else takes the place of parents in some other way. People who take over, take the role of parents, they may be forbidding or they may be loving. They may be stern or they may be lenient.
They may be actually our parents or they may be our godparents. They may be foster parents, whatever it is. But still, this is a relationship through which we all go.
And the nature of any relationship which involves a chain of power, a chain of authority is that the same relationship is perceived very differently when one’s position in that relationship shifts. That means, when a child is a student in a class, at that time, the student may be naughty, the student may feel that the teacher is too demanding. Why do I have to do all this homework? But when that student grows up and if the student chooses to become a teacher, then the way the teacher sees, oh, then if the teacher remembers how I was when I was a student, then the teacher, oh, why was I so un-understanding? Why did I not try to understand the pressure that the teacher is under? So, we get a whole new different perspective of the relationship when our position in a relationship characterized by power asymmetry.
Power asymmetry means where one person is more powerful than the other. There are certain relationships which are equal relationships. There are certain relationships where there is power asymmetry.
And in power asymmetry, when we move up to the position of power in a relationship and then we have a relationship with somebody else, it’s a very different relationship. It’s a very different take that we get on the relationship. So, for the parent-child relationship, the important thing is to recognize that, you know, our parents, we may have had a good relationship with them, we may have not so good relationship with them, whatever it is.
There is a phase which we have gone through. And now, after we grow up, we start realizing, oh, this is how, especially if somebody becomes a parent and then they start struggling with taking care of the children, then they start seeing their parents in a much more sympathetic and maybe even appreciative light. Oh, this is all that they had to go through.
But, when we are interacting with people, if we remember that these interactions, the opportunities for these interactions are not going to be there forever, they are there, but death is just around the corner. And when we meet people, we don’t know when, which meeting might just be the last meeting. So, by knowing that the relationships are temporary, we can actually infuse whatever appreciation we have not spoken, we have not brought into that relationship, whatever wisdom we wish to learn, we can learn from that relationship.
In the Mahabharata, as well as in the Bhagavatam, these are two ancient wisdom texts from India, it is described that when the grand sire Bhishma was departing from the world, at that time, Krishna, he brought the Pandavas, his devotees, all of them came together and Krishna as God himself descended on the world. And they all enquired from Bhishma and learned from him. Although, Bhishma had been their grandfather, and Bhishma had taught them a lot throughout their life, when Bhishma was about to die, Yudhishthir enquired again from him.
What is the reason for that? Because now, Yudhishthir had become a veteran. He had seen with his own eyes the brutality of war. He had seen with his own eyes the unbearably heavy price of political mismanagement.
And Bhishma had seen much more. Yudhishthir wanted to ensure that he would not in any way commit the mistakes which had been committed earlier. That he would be able to guide his citizens competently.
And thus, the same person with whom, from whom he had learned throughout his life, now he sat, he stood actually. Bhishma was on the arrow bed, but he stood and learned from him for hours and hours and days and days. And by hearing from Bhishma thus, the submissive hearing was the way Yudhishthir conveyed his appreciation.
And Bhishma drew on his vast erudition, his vast experience and gave practically an ocean of wisdom. The Anushasan Parva and the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata are among its biggest sections. And they are filled with extraordinarily deep wisdom, practical as well as philosophical, for learning how to live life.
So, life lessons are something which you can learn from those who have gone through life. And those who have intimate relationship with us, with whom we have intimate relationship, rather than taking them for granted, as we go through a new phase in our life, we can observe them and we can visualize how they may have gone through this phase. And thus, we can enrich ourselves with their wisdom.
Knowing that they are not going to be there forever, we can keep taking inputs from them and keep moving onwards in our life.