Life and Grief

                                                

                                                           "A story of apples"

Someone told me this story once and the meaning of it, and it still resonates in my mind.

There was a man who loved apples, he had a basket for them and he used to buy half a dozen and eat them, two times a day. Every morning he brought them from the fruit shop and eat them and the same next day. One day, half of his apples got rotten and he couldn't eat them. He went to buy more but couldn't get them after searching for them the whole night. He could breathe and live without those apples, still he cried a lot for he couldn't get his apples for night. Next morning, his eyes caught sight of beautiful grapes in a fruit shop and he brought them home. He ate them, placed a bunch of them the next day in the same basket and ate them and so on for the whole season. He ended his grief of apples by replacing them with grapes which would've been replaced by some other fruit any day and so on.

We all are that man. We get attached to something and we associate our heart and joy with them, and when it gets lost or out of our reach or unavailable, there's this excruciating pain which becomes sharper with time and then we replace that grief with something happy that calms us down which then itself becomes another grief and so on. We think we are replacing our loss with gain, our grief with happiness, our desolation with delight, when infact, we are just replacing loss with another loss, grief with another grief, and desolation with another desolation. And every time we lose something, one after the other, we think we have become strong enough to handle the pain that's waiting for us ahead but fate hits us every time in a unique way and the pain is different every time and to end it completely, we always have to replace it, with another one. Replacement is what that keeps us going, and we think it's the end of the pain that gives us the power to keep going. Happiness is not short lived, neither is sorrow, and life just contains patches of sadness and the intervals between them, we call them 'happiness'.