The Ode to Endless Ladder!!!

The ladder never ends. As you climb up rungs and live under the illusion or fallacy that you’ve secured one more victory in life, you look skywards and realize the ladder just got longer, the end somewhere out of sight, beyond the clouds…

All your life you can keep climbing the ladder in the quest to reach the top and never get there! This can be perceived in two ways – the optimist’s dream and the pessimist’s nightmare. The optimist sees this as ambition – a way to push oneself towards achieving more and more. The pessimist knows that this means being insatiable – never satisfied with what one has in life.

While on the way up, a hand may be extended at you for help. Grab it and help, because one good turn deserves another. Once you are higher, you might need a helping hand yourself. It is also true that at every rung scaled, a mad multitude of hands will crop out of nowhere to rip, drag & pummel you down. For just as one person’s manna is another person’s poison, likewise the success of one indeed poisons the minds of many. While many take joy in the success of one, there are others who do not think of how to replicate such success for themselves but plot how to displace the one who’s higher up somewhere on the ladder. Terminally, the seeds of misery are sown & the chalice of woe tipped over. No one emerges a winner. But in the Almighty’s courtyard, there will be justice for all. For one cannot wage a war against one’s destiny, and what is fated to happen shall play itself out.

Is it the need to survive that drives many to entrench self & others in miseries of their own making? A lesson needs to be learnt - Survival is not the sole mantra. Surviving peacefully, with contentment & without malice towards others is! And this will give you what no amount of wealth or fame can provide – adoration & respect of loved ones and the greatest treasure of them all – Happiness.

Therefore, live the optimist’s dream. Keep climbing, irrespective of the hands clawing at you. And while you’re at it, have tones of fun :)