TO SIR, WITH LOVE!

I  and a bunch of my old school friends decided to meet our old English school teacher, Mr. Chauhan few months back. 

We got to know he wasn’t keeping well so we all decided to pay him a visit.

To us he narrated his biggest life lesson, thought of penning it and feel there can’t be a better day than today to share.

Happy Teacher’s day Sir!

He said my understanding of life is that it’s a very simple, playful, light-hearted thing. Don’t disturb it by your seriousness. Move with it. So when it is hot, don’t eat hotstuff; have a cold drink. When it is cold then change; there is no need to follow the same principle every day forever. That is making people so miserable, because they won’t change. They think to remain unchanging in their principles gives them certain strength. They are wrong. It simply sucks all their strength; they are the weakest people on the earth.

They are like small children who have grown up and are still using the pajamas which were made when they were babies. Now they are looking awkward. They are feeling difficulty, they are holding the pajamas all the time, because they are slipping again and again. People are laughing. No, as you grow, your pajamas also should grow; but because pajamas do not grow, you have to change them.

So I don’t see any problem in it, but I can see this is not only one person’s situation. Millions of people are living this way. They make a strict discipline and then get into trouble. Nobody is putting them into trouble but their own principles. If they leave them they feel bad, if they follow them they suffer.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. Be a little more compassionate, a little more loving. So I don’t teach a principled life; I teach you clearly an unprincipled life, a life of intelligence which changes with every change around you. You don’t have a principle that creates a difficulty in changing. Be absolutely unprincipled and just follow life. And there will be no misery in your life.

You can live this whole life with so many songs and so many dances, and out of those songs and dances will arise your gratitude. And I call that gratitude your religiousness — gratitude towards existence.

But you don’t give a chance for your own life to flower. Your principles are your prisons, and they go on becoming bigger and bigger. You will be surprised to know that for a Buddhist monk there are thirty three thousand principles to be followed. Now even to remember them is impossible. On each step, at each moment you have to figure out: what to do, what not to do.

Just do whatsoever is pleasant — pleasant to you and pleasant to your surroundings. Just do something which brings a song to you and creates a rhythm around you, of celebration.

This life I call a religious life: it has no principles, it has no discipline, it has no laws, it has only one single approach, and that is to live intelligently.