Life = Coddiwompling!

Always it is the journey that’s more important than the destination.

A Facebook meme that came in my newsfeed piqued my interest. It read: Coddiwomple (v.) to travel in a purposeful manner to a vague destination. Instantly, I made a spiritual connection with the word. I thought to myself, doesn’t this describe what we all must ideally be doing in Life?

We have all been created. And eventually we will all die. After that what? So, the destination is indeed vague and on the way to where we will all end up going – death – we are always searching for meaning. I have discovered that this search itself is futile. Because Life has no meaning.

Think about it. We have been created without our asking to be born. Our death is inevitable. It is certain. We came with nothing. We will go with nothing. So why this Life? If you can’t take away anything that you worked on acquiring in this lifetime, why slog, why earn, why invest, why engage, why love, why hate…why all this drama? So, if you hold this perspective that Osho, the Master, championed, you will realize that Life is utterly, totally meaningless. Yet, the only way to live with inner peace and happiness is to bring meaning to this meaningless Life. And only you have to bring that meaning. No one else can do it for you.

So, intelligent living really is coddiwompling – traveling in a purposeful manner to a vague destination! Simply, it is purpose that makes the difference between living and merely existing. And purpose, that seemingly elusive meaning, is what you must want to do to make your journey of this lifetime exciting, interesting, energizing and joyous. It is what makes you come alive. This morning’s Hindu carries a story  of how an RJ, Rani Jha of BIG FM, helped reunite a 6-year-old boy with his family in Mumbai after over two months of tireless efforts. Now, that’s a great example of purposeful living. I don’t see purpose as always a grand, epochal, cosmic design. I see it as the ability to do anything, just about anything, that can make you leave the world better than how you found it.

As Rajesh Khanna’s Anand says in Anand (1971, Hrishikesh Mukherjee): “Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahin!” It means, live a big Life, impactful Life, meaningful Life, not necessarily a long one! So, on that uplifting note, happy Coddiwompling people – and for company, here’s a yodeling Kishore Kumar at his best in this memorable ode to Life, Zindagi Ek Safar, from Andaz (1971, Ramesh Sippy, Hasrat Jaipuri, Shankar-Jaikishen, Rajesh Khanna, Hema Malini)!