Life calling: Where's the pilgrim?

I saw a Smirnoff Vodka ad the other day. The tagline went: "Life is calling. Where are you?"

I went quiet. Life is calling, where am I? I think I am a pilgrim in search of life? I think I read that everyone's in a state of sleep and then one day they will wake up? I think I heard that the world is a delusion; so then what is life and where is real life, and when it's calling, where am I?

This is too much thinking and very little doing. Life is done, not thought. Life is a verb, it's not a noun.

The ad showed a street full of bizarre, theatrical characters, calling out to a man in an apartment to GET OUT. He was apparantly in dreary conditions. A similar series of Nokia ads show men in boring setting - and suddenly cinematic/ circus character pop up around them.

Very funny. Very, very clever too. The bloody ads hit the modern person where it hurts most: the desire to lead a free, fulfilling life. It is amazing how many people I meet every day, every day, who think there is life out there which is better than their own life. In fact they think they have no life, and they want someone else's life, without realizing that "someone else" vies for their life! I have met women of beauty, and men of wealth and tremendous intelligence, and they are all weary of what they have. I am disturbed to hear them - so much so that I am suspicious of my own life. Is this life? Or can it become something else?

A few days ago, I thought I woke up. And I saw that life is pretty simple. Just keep doing the right things in our immediate surroundings,... and that's pretty much it. Keep the five senses alive, and note the tastes, colors, sounds, smells, sights.... never lose the sense of wonder and inquiry. We'd then be like children who have the feeling that the world lies ahead of them - and not like adults who think the world has come to stay.... and then they can't bear a change which occurs.

Finally, it helps if men and women understand one thing: nothing lasts forever. I have learnt that God's favorite people are thankful in good times, and patient in bad. What does God get from it? Nothing. What do we get from it? The understanding that this is life, right here, as it is, and no one is calling from anywhere outside but from within ourselves asking us to make the given situation better, and warning us ever so slightly that the good will not last forever, and giving us hope that the bad too shall pass!