Fulfilment
What is fulfilment? How do we know we are fulfilled and when do we know it? This is a mystery. But it is one that can be solved. It will not shake our entire being up. It will just cause a minor hiccup in our mind. And hiccups always have silly superstitions to explain them. If they don’t, they don’t qualify to be called hiccups. What kind of superstitions? If you are hiccuping somebody is remembering you. And lovingly at that. What does loving remembrance even mean in this day and age wherein nobody even has the time to remember anyone but the carpenter.
Why the carpenter? All hearts are made of wood. And for some or the other reason, they are always broken. So carpenters. Trying to fix our broken hearts…
We are also automatically fulfilled sometimes, if we actually do nothing about it. In a magical and illogical way the question of fulfilment works like a scarecrow sometimes. The things that offer us nothing back stay away and we end up feeling fulfilled without doing anything about it. At least in our minds we have thought about the question of fulfilment and reached for some kind of clarity. At least we know what action is likely to bring peace to our minds and what not. This clarity indicates that we have the capacity to know what is in our self-interest sometimes and what is not. This means that we can play the role of a healer to ourselves sometimes. At other times we come across as a complete stranger to our own interests.
This lack of symmetry in our behaviour is a rather strange phenomenon. It shocks us at least at times that we think of ourselves. Why do we have such a lack of tuning with our own selves? Can we do something about it?
We sometimes think that behaviour asynchronous to our own interests will stand out and seek attention. But it does not happen that way. It can also remain hidden deep within us for a long time. Because such behaviours are like seeds of colonial-instincts. Our personality is vulnerable. It can be taken over at times. And there is no defence acting in its favour. It is just a matter of choosing between two phenomenon. Special attributes cannot be associated between these them. This is a huge vulnerability.
We have many intrinsic ways of dealing with vulnerabilities. We overcompensate to make sure our vulnerabilities do not exploit our personalities. We overcompensate by letting minor indicators be major sirens. We then overcompensate by letting these major sirens be major alarms whether or not they deserve to be such.
But this play is not enough. When we get alarmed we are very observant about every subtle change in our personality. A temporary sinking feeling and we anoint it with a disaster of mega proportions — something which is difficult to overturn without massive effort. This is obviously opposite to the current of fulfilment being prominent in us. Thus we live our lives — incomplete and unfulfilled.å
When we talk about fulfilment; we talk about many descriptors — zoomed out. InIn the parlance of design they are termed as the typology. As we detail and explicate we realise that these descriptors are the very core of the form that fulfilment takes. This form is what we study here. We study the form so that we achieve fulfilment in a form that is lasting. In the first batch we study the descriptors that detail for us the characteristics which are necessary to know in order to formulate any blue-print of the phenomenon of fulfilment. Characteristics like ‘when’ and ‘how’. Now we have understood fulfilment to be having two states. A pleasant state and also an unpleasant state.
Because when a person believes they are fulfilled — they also become opposed to the idea of life that takes form serendipitously. Anything can happen so neither does it make sense to be in a pleasant mood neither does it make sense to be in an unpleasant mood. One will surely turn into the other with time spent.
Pleasant as in a fulsome state of being. Unpleasant as in as something that begets nostalgia or an imbalanced state of being — but one that is resolvable. Pleasant is not pleasant forever and unpleasant is also on the path of pleasure. Nothing is a fixed state which can be decided as a state which is for keeps. These are states in transition. Pleasant/unpleasant are situations which have qualities attached to them. Such qualities fade over time and become the other — pleasant becomes the unpleasant and also the other way round.
So the typology of fulfilment is not just full of the parameters of the ‘how’ and ‘when’, but also the details of who with and under the tutelage of whom. When events happen, they cannot be denied, they have to take their course. Whether they take us towards a pleasant or an unpleasant end depends on numerous factors. How — what settings does an event happen under? What is the context and what is the platform? When — what time and progression leads to a particular event? The progression of the event will also lead to something called the ‘temporal context’. What happened before and what happened next bears a lot of significance to the fact of the happening.
Who are the instigators? Who has been the inspiration or the supporters of the event taking shape? These two questions bear a lot of weight in deciding the pleasant/unpleasant nature of the fulfilment and the framing of the event.
Is it a recurring event (with a certain interval) or a one time event. Does the event happen as it is or in a certain guise? Adopting any guise will only ease the happening and response of an event. The question of ‘why’ or ‘why not’ will place any event in a background context which frames the event with the causative factors clearly and sharply.
