How many times have we run across people who vividly describe what sort of person they are! May be, first starting with education and career, ending up with their goals. Or on a personal front, describing their lives, their friends, their hobbies and what-nots.

There is always a trace of wanting to be somebody that they admire or just some image of themselves that they feel good about. There is not anything necessarily wrong with this. It provides people a goal to work towards to.

But what if you feel like you are nobody - is that bad? Isn't that an opportunity to be whatever you chose to be at any given point of time instead of trying to be someone? Isn't each of us living the life already lived by someone already in some capacity? We are what everyone in the world is and we are what everyone in the world is not. We are all the same and the different people at the same time. May be, there is no point in going around and carrying a bloated 'I' , 'Me' and 'Myself'. Just because we experience different things at different points of life does not mean we are different from one another. Just like water taking the form of the container it is contained in, we are taking the form of the experiences dished out to us. May be we chose them, may be we did not. But thats not the point, we are just the sum of incidents we are actors of and the audience of. In some sense being nobody is as big a feat as being anybody.

Like a lot of other things in life, success is also abstract. What success means to one , does not necessarily mean the same thing to another. We all know that and probably have come to terms with that. (There are cases when one has to "succeed" in the eyes of another person - a child has to do something so as to be acknowledged as successful in the parents' eyes or an employee in manager's eyes or in Indian culture, parents have the peer or social pressure to do certain things to be branded successful parents - bringing up the child and make them successful people in the eyes of the society, and like marrying their wards off etc. But then this is an entirely different arena.)

Having said that the term 'success' has an evasive meaning that differs from eye to eye, how often do we realize the meaning ourselves? Are we smart enough to figure out we have grabbed the elusive golden apple? Or is it just a mirage and we keep running behind it? Is there no such thing as success? Is it purely psychological factor - to give man a hold in life so that he does not go 'astray'? (If success does not exist, then failure is non-existent as well . What a bliss that would be) Or is the notion of success formed so that people are held accountable for something when they live as a society? Why does the train of what needs to be succeeded at grows? I guess someone might as well do some research about success as it still seems to be an unexplored area.

Assuming 'success' exists, do we care enough to define success on our own terms? Do we even give it a thought apart from being materialistic or tactic? If living life on our terms means success, how many of us really succeed in life? Or is it considered a social failure? How is that we don't recognize success with as much clarity as we do with failure? How does one exactly feel like when he or she goes on doing thing without bothering to realize that he or she has just succeeded or failure? If the success of failure to make us learn better and fail better and finally achieve the so called goal, is there such a thing as failure of success?

Going by dictionary meaning, 'cognition' is "the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning". So it is possible that we run into conflicts because of the so-called cognition since our mind (or rather right brain) is involved (by definition, cognition is not purely analytical or logical). But how do our minds deal with such conflicts? For example, supposing there is something that we have always badly wanted but facts stand that, it is impossible to get it, how many times have we convinced ourselves that the thing we wanted is not worth it after all? Does it remind of the classic fox-and-sour-grapes fable? Yes, the grapes are not worth the jump because they are sour, it is not the fox that is not worth the grapes because it is not tall enough to reach them. May be there is a psychological term for such conflicts (I am sure there is).

Our minds are the most beautiful and awe inspiring entities. It is still amazing despite the whole lot of useless justifications it can draw to deal with the situations - our failures, our successes, others' successes, our anger and almost every possible positive or negative reaction even after we "learn" the causal logical reasons behind these happenings.

Is it good or is it bad? I think it is very subjective. Just as our body has an immune system to deal with when it gets hurt in form of bruises or diseases, I think it is just a form of immune system to deal with mind's bruises. In this sense, it is good and in fact needed.

But there are countless instances where this a severe handicap. For instance, we are so keen on justifying that we forget to deal with refreshed facts. That needs smartness . To be able to deal with new realities and to unlearn old things and learn new things are as important as recovering from mind's bruises. If any human mind is capable of doing that, then there would be no 'Monty Hall' problems or there would no one whose mind is superior over the others. And what a dull place would that make since there is no scales we got to live up to?

• What if we are all nice people in the world? Will be able to appreciate that someone is actually nice?
• What if we are all alike in the world? Would we still ill treat and kill people for a different reason other than racism?
• What if Man is the not at the top of food chain? Would we still be concerned about perishing animals and near-extinct being?
• What if we are all taught at school to respect the people we live with, the earth , the sky and whatever we come into contact with, instead of scientific reasons behind things? Will situation be different now?
• What if there are no expectations on us? Will life be easy?
• What if there is no such thing as 'success'? Will there be struggles and sacrifices to capture the monstrous mirage?
• What if we have multiple lives to choose from? Will we still be unhappy and unsatisfied?
• What if someone actually creates life? Would we still believe in God and fight in his name?
• What if war and diseases are God-made instead of man-made? Has He done that as a means of control for human population?
• What if all that we see - different forms of lives, all phenomena - natural and artificial, started as accident and all that is happening is for setting it right? Will all this perish at some point?
  

I am quite curious to know how many people differentiate between being sentimental and being in love. There seems to be a thin and almost invisible line between the two. When I feel sentimental about something or someone, I think I have a feeling that I put on a false front - the 'ought' component comes in. I 'ought' to be doing so and so and the worst part of it, someone else 'ought' to be doing so and so. There is no liberation in this since we sort of set the expectations that one 'has' to do this and that.

Love or affection is all about reaching out minus the niceties and expectations. It is so simple that it seems so elusive and most often misconstrued. It does not expect anything. On a similar note, I keep wondering about the caption in the one of the ads - 'We all change for the ones we love'. I do not agree with that. Love does not really expect any sort of change in the other. Love is all about accepting the person as he or she is and finding a right balance to be able to connect and relate with the person surpassing all the differences. This does not mean that there is no emotional binding between the individuals. It simply means that you care so much for the person and you trust the person so much that you ensure that he or she has enough room and hence is more comfortable.

There is no such thing as 'unconditional love' since love by definition itself is unconditional. Love actually liberates instead of being bound to something.