Is being light wrong?

Everything in life has to have a reason, is significant, and is worth examining. In other words, living for momentary beauty or pleasure is crass and bad. This view of life is so innate in me that there could be any other possibility simply doesn’t seem right. But after spending few years with someone, who was so unavoidably close, I am forced at least to ask myself this question. At the end, however, I find myself back to where I was, just a little stressed out, and just a little exhausted. Bruised but not broken. So is being light good or bad?

I am an ardent believer that life does not run in a one-dimensional absolute pathway. That’s the simple reason we have so many explanations for life, time, love, and other hard questions. So when I landed up reading this novel authored by Milan Kundera – “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” I sort of get a detailed perspective of weightiness and lightness.

Purely from my own personal context, I have been accused of – “why do you take everything so seriously”. Why do you think so much? Just to qualify seriousness a bit more, it is not that I don’t enjoy or have fun. But there is an undercurrent of an intense reason or dedication for every thing that I do. Even things that I do spontaneously, I need to go back and find a reason why I did so. Even my feelings typically have to have a rational basis. And the biggest irony is - at times the reason I give is – “It’s okay to be unreasonable.” Like calling up my dear friend at middle of the night and asking her out for a coffee. But until I do not have a basis – I just go nuts! This has its own share of consequences. There is a constant battle of heart and mind that I need to fight. My emotions at times lack clarity. I appear confused and indecisive. Yet that’s precisely what makes me, defines who I am, and expresses me. This is my weirdness. I think as human beings all of us are weird in our own ways. The sooner we embrace that part of ours the better off we are, overall.

As Kundera has described through a marriage of two polarities – the guy is light and the girl is weighty, and how such a relationship becomes a big torture. The guy is a philanderer, the girl is a dedicated soul – a lover of Beethoven, and has a purpose and belief in her existence. Hmm! Tell me about the compatibility part. Although the beauty of the novel was how the characters develop – the guy from being light gets diffused gradually by the weight from his wife and makes mends in his ways to be with her finally. The marriage will never be happy, it will always be a struggle, but they carry on. In real life, I guess, divorce is an easier option. I am thankful that I read this book, to get a historical and philosophical perspective that lightness is not necessarily bad, as I have always made that out to be. It is just another way of being just as weightiness is. And just as absolutes will never carry the day – being perpetually weighty or perpetually light is not going to be good either. But that’s an ongoing training and development as far as living my life is concerned.

Now this I write in a conceptual way. But I know that being weighty and significant is so ingrained in me that – that ain’t gonna change! Maybe, change incrementally over a long period of time. Growing and relishing my diet - Ayn Rand for lunch and Karl Marx for dinner - in my formative years, and beyond, I cannot expect to be light in any way. But it is interesting how the Greek philosopher Paremenides considered weight as negative many years back. And for now, I can simply marvel and rejoice – how many shades and how many different ways of living life exists in this beautiful world.