You Have To Live Life To Experience It - Simple But True!

Do you remember the time when you were young and older people told you, ‘You will know when you are old.’ And you ignored the statement because even though you knew people get old, you thought it wouldn’t happen to you at a subliminal level?

In your twenties, you looked at people in their forties and thought they were ancient?

In Vipassana meditation, the teacher tells a story of a man going to Buddha and asking why only some people progress on the path who come to his teachings, while others do not. Buddha answers in a reverse questioning format. He asks the young man - Where are you from? Then a young man says from X town. Buddha asks - well, in that case, when you give directions to X town, does your audience reach X town? The young man scoffs and says, ‘How is that possible, Sir? They will only get to the X town if they walk on the path.’ Buddha says, ‘Similarly, young man, only if you walk the directions I give you, you will experience a change.’ The entire teaching of Vipassana is experiential - unless I experience it for myself, then it is the truth; otherwise, it is just an intellectual knowing.

That is true for life in general. We know so many things about life—like we will all die, we all grow old, when we grow old, we have aches/illnesses, our bodies age as we grow old, old age is suffering, forties are the new thirties, and people who gain success have put in a lot of hard work. BUT - all of these are at an intellectual level. When I was a child, I knew my parents would get old, but I did not know what it would be like. I knew death comes to all, but only when my dog passed away did I see what it actually feels like. Even as I write the blog, I am aware that I am stating words on the page - intellectually, but the experience of those words will happen outside the page. I am conveying intellectually that the words must be experienced to be true. On a side note, this is another key distinction between AI and humans. Only humankind can experience - AI can only intellectualise and regurgitate our experiences.

Going back to experiential living, some things cannot be experienced before their time. That’s why I will only know what being old feels like when I grow old. I can watch my parents grow old, I can watch my friends’ parents grow old, and I can read books on growing old, but I will only know what being old is like when I am old. Isn’t it funny that all of these people are living in the world simultaneously? We will know only when our time comes. Yet, we all live our phases of life so confidently as if we know it all. In hindsight, I thought I would not grow old, and here I am looking at the young ones thinking the same. And no amount of talking or explaining will make that go away. I guess that is the beauty of life - if we have already experienced being old when we were young, then can we really be young?

Sometimes, you have to step back and admire how wonderfully the universe works for us to experience life fully—we need to think about it sometimes. Do you think about these things sometimes?