Reasons

About six years ago, I read something prosaic on CNN.com. I was so delighted that something, anything held my attention for a little while that I turned to reading news, CNN specifically, all the time. That led me into thinking I have some kind of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which was not consistent. My Compulsions were different every day. Reading CNN every time I took out the phone, reading a hundred novels by one author in a week because I could read one novel of hers one day, watching seven seasons of Game of Thrones in three days because I could watch one episode with interest,  drinking vanilla lattes each time i visited any coffee shop, just because I could taste and like it one time... One compulsion to the road to discovering my next obsession. Back then, my condition was at it's best self, and I didn't have a clue. I was sick and didn't know it and kept getting worse. My toddler was extremely active and so curious. I had not interacted exclusively with any other healthy baby before then, for my son has extreme special needs. A mom getting furious with a toddler for being healthy and active and a child in general! The consensus was that I truly didn't deserve to be a mom - my one son was not 'NORMAL' and the other wasn't appreciated even being NORMAL. Depression, mine was the enervating kind that makes you hate yourself and rage at the world,  in my opinion is not just a state of mind, but a way of mind. I am always self-critical, but put me on a cyclic loop of self-flagellation, I was ready to become suddenly religious just to validate that hell existed!

The point of all this is that we need reasons. If a bad thing happens, we need to know why. My uncle was killed by a rash driver. Blame reckless driving! My son was born with special needs. Blame poor diet, autosomal inheritance, my lack of obsession over my pregnancy, bad me, bad choices, bad me, bad me and everything about me bad! And then Dad died one fine day while meditating. If I were religious, I could have rationalized that my benevolent God was unhappy with me about something. Unfortunately for me I do not believe in a God, benevolent or otherwise. Paraphrasing Stephen Hawking, we are not here in existence because of some special reason. We are special simply because we exist. So, where does the search for reason end for uber-rational people who don't really care about the origins of the Universe? If someone proved Hawking Radiation and somewhere created something from nothing, I would be delighted to read and learn the results, but I won't be particularly interested to conduct the experiment. It is simply not my forte! So, to help me, I have come up with a kind of philosophy that helps me move on. I call it the "It Happens" Model.

My little one gets yelled at by me in the throes of a headache regularly for something or the other. And then when I morph back into a human again and explain myself later, and she gives me her reasons in turn for whatever she did. If I am still mildly grumpy after my outburst, she tells me, "Es ist vorbei Mama"! "It is over", is what it translates into. Children can let it go, but adults cannot. We all have brain damage probably. The beautiful minds we are born with is no longer undamaged by our constantly punishing ways of thinking. The first thing I did with my child after learning that I have some physical problem is quote Hawking to her - "The Universe does not allow Perfection"! It is now a sort-of family motto with us. I am the result of some matter-anti-matter asymmetry that resulted in this, probably one of many,  Universes. And then nature experimented till it created DNA in one insignificant planet in what-seems-unremarkable corner of one Galaxy in so many! Such remarkable insignificance is worth marveling over. How Extraordinarily Ordinary we are to exist! This moment that I am alive is all I can be sure exists. Every good or bad thing happening has only one reason - "It happens". I happened, everything good that happened to me just happened, and so did everything bad. No Rhyme, No Reason other than it just does. That is the only spirituality that makes sense and gives me marginal comfort. However, I couldn't have taken to my Uncle's rash death lightly because it was injustice!

The idea of justice is the basis for all our society's rules. Our ancestors probably killed each other willy-nilly until one sensible person said, "if we all decided not to kill, may be nobody will kill each of us anytime they want"! Must have been a female, for they would have hated giving birth so many times to soon-to-die offspring! For whatever reason, our societies have rules that work for most of the population. Justice in itself is again an idealistic principle and we adapt it to who and where we are. As an Indian, it is a deep injustice to me that Churchill and Robert Clive are considered heroes in any part of the world. Any sensible American ought to know how unjust to the native Americans their nation's veneration of Columbus is. Again, every society that exists today, grew at the cost of an other's demise. Our rules adapt constantly. It's allowed to kill another human in self-defense. It is not allowed when you cannot prove it. It is allowed to be racist or bigoted if your own kind says so. We are inconsistent creatures with illogical rules and it is indeed thanks to our our strong sense of survival that we seem to flourish as a species. Even a wolf-pack has more consistent laws than we do. Perhaps that is the one reason we are at the top of the food-chain. Adapt till you emerge as the one left alive.

As an undergrad, I helped develop programs to prove my Professors' theories. One fine day, our calculations to reduce the rank of a control system yielded a division by zero error. His solution, that was also published internationally - "Take a reciprocal"! Research, discoveries and human logic itself is happenstance. What works right now is practiced. What is commonly practiced is law. What is law must be obeyed by all, even if it doesn't work for all. Injustice is inbred in our idea of justice. In Dickens' words, "there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice" - in the world of children! In the world we expect them to live in, injustice is rife and the foundation. The idea is to minimize the possibility of injustice rather than perpetuating a perfect world. Because, like even a child can tell you, "the Universe does not allow perfection"!

When do we stop looking back and regretting? We can never forget history and its lessons, and must take away with us the lessons along with it's reasons to exist. And yet, humans are remarkable in forgetting the past and its reasons and yet cling to the results of the past. Both World Wars started because of socioeconomic inequity. The have-nots targeted a group of people perpetuated to have it all, and anything goes if you judge yourself victimized. Thinking about ourselves as the wronged party is natural, except when the powerful imagine themselves wronged. There can never be any meaningful reparation to the wronged people of the past. Their merit was not in their merits, rather they merit to be acknowledged for existing. When you cease someone's existence, it is the ultimate injustice by human law and the laws of nature. There is no place we are going from here. This is all. So, true justice will just have to be ways in which we can leave each other to their own elements.

I imagine people needed to reproduce young in the past to sustain themselves and their clans. So, marry, propagate, make a clan, make them fear you, take care of you when you are no longer feared as a law and make it their duty to take care of your dead. Whatever else hinders this propagation was pronounced evil- ergo, every society has rules to safeguard these boundaries. We shall forever keep arguing the merits of one God over others, one sex over the other(s), one way over all others. What is relevant in any culture of the human kind is who is the most powerful right now and that in turn changes to, how can i stay the most powerful? Back to the starting point, my life teaches me everyday to choose my battles. To choose which way I go now and why. And it is imperative that I remember why. So, given a similar choice later on, my child would know which way to go, not based on what I chose in my life, but rather why. There is nothing we can teach the next generation, apart from asking for the reason. All else, they can do better than us.