Healthy Lifestyle
 Self Empowerment 

Writing the Book of My Own Life
(© Kamala Ramchandani-Naharwar)

"We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploration will be to arrive
where we started and know the place for the first time." (T.S.Elliot)

When I am awake and alive to all of my living, when it holds my attention, never knowing what is going to happen next, then perhaps I have no need to rely on any written word as gospel, as a concordance for living, because my every moment's awareness is enlightening, revealing, thrilling, even though it may also be heartbreaking. My life is a "book" of which I cannot peep at the ending till I reach it. What can be more engrossing? Revealing? It may be dramatic, suspenseful, a veritable wilderness. What a wonderful series of Self-revelation!

Unlike a book, though, I cannot gloss over the parts which are tiresome, I cannot try to get it over with fast and go on to a more interesting part. And as with a book, I need the painful parts as much as the joyful ones, to give depth of meaning and value to my living. I need to plunge deep into self-depths of understanding and feeling, to be alive to all things, as all things, lest I become unmindful, lest I become insensitive.

As I turn each page I may discover walls of ice, raging infernos, or exotic, riotous colours of exhilerating shades of joy and sadness. Each chapter contains 365 pages, and as to how many chapters? Who knows? But one thing I can be sure of ...... that when I reach what I think is the end ...... what I consider to be the "last chapter", it will not be an end, I will be at the beginning, and I will "know the place for the first time".

Even if I appear to put this `book' down for a while, it will not be the end, for it is a Self-book of which I am an intrinsic part. (The capital `S' of Self refers to the God-Self we all are a part of) My life, the way I seem to live it, the way I NEED to live it, is my Self-interpretation of this book. What I make of it is up to me. It is a Self-reading that for my convenience I have chosen to divide into days and years, pages and chapters, birth and death, a beginning and an end. This is of my own choosing. It is my Self-reading and Self-interpretation that writes the book. Each page is a `blank' till I read-write it in/as mine own understanding. I hold the pen and pen the words as surely as the murdered is responsible for his own murder. I am the writer-printer-reader, and the editor of my own living of Self. I cannot `end' what I write for I never really `began'. I am a part of an everywhere God-Self.

Thus have I learnt........