Many people will pledge many things around this time.
Some will keep them. Some will not.
Like, losing weight, and stuff.
I do not want to start the New Year with any promises that I won’t be able to keep.
This is a hard choice. This is not easy for me. My ego has always been a baggage for me. Recently, I’ve noticed that it’s become a major burden.
I want to shed it. I want to get rid of it.
Ego is not pride. Pride is something different. Pride gives you a reason to live. Pride gives you an identity. Pride keeps you with your history and heritage. Pride attaches you with your genes, your traditions, your religion, your belief system, your ideology. Pride helps you to love the people you want to love.
But really, ego does not give you anything. If you think of it, it is almost unreal. It is fake. Ego is not synonymous with pride. The more ego you have, the more unproductive you become. Because you’re running after the shadows of ego all the time, when it is just that: shadows. The shadows do not have a real face. They do not own a substance.
I love my prides. Pride is my birthplace Calcutta. Pride is my root in Bengaliness, and in my Indianness. Pride is my accomplishments from an impoverished childhood to a somewhat economically stable fifties. Pride is my Hinduism. Pride is my school years, my college years, my university years — both in India and in the U.S. Pride is my ability to wade through all the muck and morose, to live a more or less honest, upright, and greed-free life.
Ego, on the other hand, is truly meaningless. It’s baggage you can get rid of anytime, anywhere, free of charge. I’ll give you a simple, real-life example. Like, as if I’m driving on the correct lane at the correct speed, following all the rules and regulations, and then suddenly a rash driver flouts all the laws and ethics, and cuts in and almost hits me and speeds away, leaving me with this enormous urge to challenge him, and follow him at high speed and cut into his lane and throw verbal fist fights. It’s that element of my life that I do not need, and can easily part with. It does not give me any peace. In fact, all the egotistic acts I have done in my life — one after the other — have only made me more troubled and irked and irate inside.
Or, suppose, I desperately want to know how many readers hit my blog, or how many Facebook friends liked my updates. Meaningless…truly, absolutely meaningless. Ego…and nothing else.
I do not want Mr. Ego in my life. I am what I am, without him. I am no less than what I am, sans that vice. In fact, I am a much better and happier person, without him.
I know that my writing on this subject is not going to make the world ego-free. Those who have the maximum arrogance and show-off, like those rash drivers and corporate profiteers commuting on their helicopters across Wall Street will keep flaunting them one way or the other, and keep making the world more difficult to live.
But this promise is not to make the world a better place. This promise is to make my mind a better place. My peace is at stake because of those people. I do not want them to destroy my peace.
I want to pledge in 2015 that only I, and nobody else, can destroy my peace.
And an ego-less me will not let that happen.
Peace and Prosperity to All. It has been a wonderful, productive and blessed year.
Hope to keep in touch with all of you, and talk heart to heart, free of that ego.
“Om Tat Sat.” All that is the Truth.
Sincerely and Honestly,
Partha
Brooklyn, New York
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Humanity College 