Inconsistent Voyage

Many of us have heard the story of the hare and the tortoise which gave us the moral that ‘The slow and the steady wins the race’. After ages, the moral changed itself and was depicted as ‘The slow and the consistent wins the race’. A person must be consistent throughout if he wants to achieve his goals. The dreams can be fulfilled only by remaining consistent. The efforts put in consistently towards a goal always helps to achieve it. But life is not a goal to be completed, it is a mystery to be lived and experienced. We cannot always hover around our goals throughout and try pushing ourselves to achieve it. Let me explain the meaning of consistency in a different way.

The term consistency means your today is obedient to your yesterday. You are consistent in some tasks means that you follow them like rituals every day. It means the present should always follow the past or must be in synchronization with it. If a person is consistent, how will he grow? The growth is only possible when the present can go beyond the past. The present can seek the experiences from the past, can use them as stepping stones in building the future, but cannot get cling to it in the name of consistency. If I maintain a great deal of consistency, how my present is going to be different than the past and I will have the same future as my past. For example: I have seen a lot of people doing the same stuff again and again over a period of years. A person gets up in the morning, goes for a walk, comes back home and then fresh up to go to the office. He returns home and then goes off to the bed. The new day follows the old. He goes on repeating the same task everyday throughout his life. No change happens with him. In my opinion, to be blunt such consistent people are stupid. Their life sees no growth and is stagnant. Only dead bodies are consistent which do not move and maintain the law of inertia. Such people go on rotting and they don’t live.

The consistency is the school for the fools who have no courage in trying something new. They have no balls to go for a new experiment and exploration. They see life as a balance sheet which should always show profit. If the consistency is followed for a long time, the person becomes a programmed Robot. It dwells you into stasis, halting the evolutionary process within. The consistent people do not have the guts to face the unknown future and remain unavailable to the unknowable and the mysteries of life. They are in a hurry to get cling to a dogma, where they acquire a certain orthodoxy and stop the process of evolution. Life is best experienced when a person sees it as a dialectical phenomenon. It has its own thesis, antithesis and carries out its own synthesis. Your past is a thesis, which has given you your current wisdom, the present is the antithesis which gives you courage to contradict your past and try something new. The future is your synthesis which gives you the total understanding of your past and the present. The thesis you create in the past will be followed by antithesis in the present to generate the synthesis in the future. This is a circular process and it goes on and on.

The person should try out new things and in doing so he should try to contradict his own past. Life is a contradictory process and thus any human being cannot be defined. If I defined myself today, I will limit my horizons and then I will have no scope to expand tomorrow. I cannot define myself, as I cannot be contained in an envelope of words, I am beyond any storage. A saint today can be a sinner tomorrow and vice versa. The change is the only truth ever known to mankind. In becoming inconsistent, the person will not follow his past, will remain free for his present and future. He will not have any commitments and promises needed to be fulfilled and in doing so, he will live in the present with totality. So, whenever you face a contradiction, understand that life is trying to break your consistency and you are being tied to it. With consistency, your existence is false, a mask on the face drifting you away from your true self. Hence, try to be inconsistent, not always but sometimes and you will experience that life has taught you a new lesson.

- Dr. Dhananjay Patel