Art of Living

Purpose of human life and its difference with other forms of life on the Earth is to be more meaningful than others else, it remains as that of human primates thousands of years back. The differences of human life from others are a civilization of morality, developed intellect to use discretion, and most importantly, the human sensitivities to understand and regulate pleasures and pain of life through sciences such as medicine, psychology, bioengineering, biochemistry, etc apart from physical sciences to understand Nature and mold life accordingly, and engineering and technologies to make human life more comfortable.

The art of living means choosing a lifestyle to derive maximum happiness to the self without hurting any – the ultimate objective of every form of life. Different aspects of lifestyle to be considered for an artful living may be enumerated as –

1. Nurturing of human creativity through judicious application of tolerances,
2. Keeping a balance through observing limits,
3. Balance of Contentment and Progress,
4. Dealing with sorrows and pains effectively, and
5. Making progress in a sustainable way to keep long term interests of life on the Earth

Creativity through Tolerances

 Nature is the greatest creator which goes by its preset principle to keep a balance of things in the Universe creating everything with uniqueness through judicious application of tolerances. We humans may stand second to Nature in this respect through inspirations from the Nature itself. Inspiring parameters of Nature is to work with preset principles through judicious application of available tolerances. This is here creativity is distinguished from productivity.

Uniqueness of everything even within a type is achieved through application of tolerances judiciously. This is where human mind proves superior to machines, and creativity becomes superior to productivity. A machine has to work within preset very close tolerances producing everything within a type identically. Nature always creates and human mind may create with large tolerances at their command to produce everything uniquely even within a type. This is where the contentment of being creative comes from – judicious application of tolerances.    

Keeping a Balance through Limits

At the core of civilized human life is morality that may be used as the fundamental principle of human life to keep balance within human and other forms of life. The greatest way of living with morality is to find an opportunity for working hard and living on its outcome. This will ensure that nobody is exploited by a person for his/her pleasures of living. Living on one’s hard work provides unmatched contentment to the person.

There is a poetic composition by a Hindi poet that means, ‘Neither speaking too much is good nor keeping too much silence is good, neither too much rain is good nor too much of sunlight is good’ with a general message to all of us that we must have studied limits of everything and should never cross these limits to keep a balance. This applies to every person and everything one does. These limits are decided upon as social norms.

An essential norm of Nature to keep the balance is to cleanse off the old to give place to new. When one applies this principle of giving place to others to one’s conduct, it becomes social discipline – the essence of human civilization.    

Contentment and Material Prosperity

The ultimate objective of every endeavor is contentment, and we tend to seek it through material prosperity. Through human experiential wisdom, we can say that material prosperity is essential for progress but it fails to provide much-needed contentment. 

On the other hand, contentment is a mental state which may be attained through thoughtfulness and intellectual pursuits with bare minimum of material prosperity. This level of prosperity is easily attainable without much of worries and anxieties. Worries and anxieties of attaining material prosperity ruin one’s chances of attaining peace of mind, intellectual creativity and hence the contentment.   

Sorrows and Pains as Teachers

In real life, some sorrows and pains must be expected by everybody – rich or poor, young or old, etc. These indicate that the person is wrong somewhere either in his/her concepts of life, or his/her alignment with natural forces. Thus, every sorrow or pain tells the person to review his/her lifestyle not to have any such problem in future. Thus, the pains and sorrows are our teachers. Had these not been there, humanity would not have learned anything and progressed.

Sustainable Pleasures for Happiness

Happiness is most often an accumulation of pleasures, but it comes only when pleasures are sustainable through sowing seeds of more pleasures. A person might feel an instant pleasure in say, stealing but this pleasure is not sustainable and leads him/her to miseries. Similarly, lecherous conduct, intoxication, gambling etc, which appear to be pleasures to some at some moments lead the persons to miseries. There, pleasures that don’t sustain are to be avoided whatever may be the attraction for such a pleasure.