Hungarian-born, New York-based financier George Soros, 89, pinpoints a day in 1979 when, walking along a London street, he suddenly felt a hammering in his chest and feared he was having a heart attack. That was the moment when he said to himself, “What’s the point?” Soros took personal stock: his investment fund at that time had reached $100 million in assets, and his individual worth was $30 million (in 2017 his net worth was estimated to be more than $25 billion). “I felt I had made enough money for my personal needs,” he said, and he decided to direct some of his bounty into a philanthropy.
I read this 25 years ago in a Time magazine profile (July 10, 1995). What struck me then, and what has stuck in my mind to this day, is not so much the vastness of Soros’s wealth and the abundance of his philanthropy but this simple question: “What’s the point?” It’s a question I ask myself often. The frequency of asking myself, “What’s the point?” has increased with age. Every moment in this world someone is born somewhere while someone else dies. We don’t even think about this. But death becomes a headline during a pandemic, making the question “What’s the point?” even more urgent.
When common people like you and me read features such as the one on George Soros and other billionaires-turned-philanthropists, how do we react? A few reactions are predictable. For instance, it is natural that most will admire such people and appreciate their spirit of service. Those with financially strapped projects on hand may want to get in touch with them. Mean, stingy people may be horrified at what they might see as the thoughtless extravagance of the super rich and predict that they will repent later. Some fantasists are likely to sigh and say, “If I had such big bucks, I too could have given them away.”
Every reaction tells us something about the person who is reacting. Our words and actions invariably give us away, no matter how hard we may try to project ourselves differently. It is easier to be ourselves than to appear to be what we want others to take us to be. Alas, we waste most of our energy trying to change our exterior. With only a fraction of that energy, it is possible to make our interior more beautiful.
Let’s go back to the question that started Soros’s philanthropic career: “What’s the point?” Almost the first thing we realize is that it is not impossible for our own hearts to start beating erratically at any moment. Death is a natural process. What is unnatural is living, and we manage to live for years at a stretch. Listen to this ancient verse:
मरणं प्रकृति: शरीरिणां विकृति: जीवितमुच्यते बुधै: ।
क्षणमप्यवतिष्ठते श्वसन् यदि जन्तुर्ननु लाभवानसौ ॥
Maraṇaṁ prakṛtiḥ śarīriṇāṁ vikṛtiḥ jīvitam ucyate budhaiḥ
Kṣaṇam api-avatiṣṭhate śvasan yadi jantur-nanu lābhavān asau.
“The wise say that it is natural for people to die and unnatural for them to live. If a person manages to live even for a moment, they should consider themselves fortunate.”
Vedanta teachers give the example of a jar filled with water. Suppose holes are punched into it from all sides. Should we be surprised if the water drains out? But let us suppose we find water not draining out. Now, that would be unnatural. So these teachers say, here is this body-jar filled with life-water (prāņa). Isn’t it altogether amazing that life manages to remain inside the body for years together in spite of several available exits? Fortunate, indeed, is a person who can live even for a moment!
Every one of us is a walking, breathing miracle of life. Our misfortune is that we don’t feel ourselves to be fortunate when we are living. On their deathbed people are ready to spend a fortune to be able to survive a little longer. We understand the blessing of being alive only when we are faced with the imminent prospect of death. It is only then that most of us—and a few, not even then—begin to question the value of our life’s achievements.
Something like that seems to have happened to George Soros, which brought forth the question “What’s the point?” As it turned out, the death-scare that Soros got was only a false alarm. But it had done its job of awakening this man and directing his life’s energies into a more fruitful, meaningful and fulfilling channel. While it would have been easy to forget one erratic heartbeat, Soros chose to remember it—fortunately for him and fortunately for the millions of his beneficiaries.
What about your and my heartbeats? Is it necessary for us to wait until we get some ominous signals in some unexpected way at some unexpected time? By then it might be too late to pull through. Why not begin the preparation now, this very moment, when things don’t appear so bad? We must proceed along two fronts: one, learning how to be ready for the inevitable event called death; and two, ceaselessly remaining conscious of the blessing of being alive.
At first sight, the two—life and death—appear to be different from each other, but they are not really different. They are just two sides of the same coin. If we know how to die, we’ll automatically know how to live, and vice versa. But because of our inborn dread of anything connected with death, how-to-live discussions seem to be more pleasant than how-to-die discussions. No discussion on life, however, can be complete without reference to death, just as no discussion on death can be complete without reference to life.
It is possible to see life as a period spanning two deaths—the death of my previous body in my last birth and the upcoming death of the present body in this birth. What we do within this intervening period determines the course of our future existence. What we are experiencing now has been determined already by what we did in the past. This is the theory of karma. It is neither fate nor God’s will. Karma simply means being accountable to myself. I don’t have to search for scapegoats for my follies or blame others for my woes. I just have to recognize and accept my own responsibility in being what I am and doing what I do.
Responsibility goes hand in hand with awareness. If I’m responsible for something or someone, I must be aware that I am responsible. Else how will I—and why should I—willingly employ my time and energy in that direction? I am responsible for my own life, my present and my future. When I keep my awareness shining brightly on this important truth, I know what I must do in order to attain my goals.
Goals we all have, but not all of us have cared to examine them mindfully. If we do that, keeping our own prejudices and pet ideas aside, we shall discover that quite a number of our so-called goals are no great shakes. Not only are they worthless, they are also a needless drag on our time and energy. Instead of making us more free, more happy, more peaceful, they bind us, they create new anxieties in us, they disturb our inner harmony. When we find this during our sane moments, we must have the courage and wisdom to abandon these goals.
Many of our goals start out as the means to some other goal and at some stage they get promoted to being goals in their own right. Then the mischief starts. Take, for instance, the desire for happiness, security, stability—a perfectly understandable, agreeable desire. To fulfill this desire I need money. This too, let us assume, is OK. Money is thus the means. Then I start on my money-making spree. So long as I remember that money is the means, I am safe.
But it is not easy to remember this always, because we find that most of us forget this often. Money suddenly becomes the goal and ceases to be the means. People sacrifice their existing happiness, security, stability—to get more of which was their goal, remember—and run madly after money. This often leaves them with precious little time to spend time with their family, or to play, or to read books, or to do gardening, or to saunter along a stream or in a park. There is no longer any time for such things.
Time is money in this bustling, hurried world of today. So time should not be “wasted.” We are so busy with our careers and with making money that we ignore the happiness which is already available. We know, of course, that a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, but we are so taken with those two, that the bird in hand flies away. When shall we, oh when shall we, realize that our present happiness is infinitely more precious than some future happiness which may never come.
The problem is that “future” happiness can never be experienced. What is experienced is always “present” happiness. Life can be lived only in the present moment. The past has already gone, the future is not yet here. If we don’t develop the capacity to identify and experience our present happiness, we shall totally miss the future happiness when it finally arrives and becomes the present.
The same thing applies to our desire for stability and security. We already have these to some extent and we want to strengthen these. That’s fine. But we go about doing this by undermining or ignoring our existing stability and security, while dreaming of some special kind of future stability. That’s crazy. Again, no one knows what’s in store in the future. Here is the present—right now, right here. If I value the present and deal with it intelligently, the future will take care of itself. If I want to be happy in the future, I must learn to be happy in the present. There is no other way.
Back in 1980s when I was in our Delhi monastery, we had a kitchen-assistant named Lal Singh. This young man, who was in his early twenties, hailed from the Garhwal region in the foothills of the Himalayas. Hardworking and somewhat clownish, Lal Singh was loved by all. He received a decent salary and could have, within his means, lived happily. But he wanted to get rich—and do it quickly. So he bought lottery tickets every month, not one or two, which would have been all right, but many tickets, exhausting sometimes more than half of his salary. Until the results were out in the papers, he would be then on tenterhooks.
Most of the time he drew a blank. On some occasions he won a few minor prizes, more or less recovering the money he had spent that month. It was customary for him to approach some young monastic with a request to check from the newspaper whether he had won anything. As the swami or brahmachari scanned the numbers, the expression on Lal Singh’s face was worth seeing: hope, anxiety and, when the news was bad, the inevitable dismay.
Once Lal Singh won ₹500; he was on cloud nine. He had already decided what to do with this windfall. His reasoning was simplistic: if I got 500 today, I’m certain to get 500,000 tomorrow. That is how we found him the following month coming with 500 lottery tickets and a newspaper: “Maharaj, could you please check these for me?” Not even one of those 500 tickets proved lucky. Lal Singh nearly wept. We thought this blow would wean him away from his addiction to lottery. But no. Next month he had again a bunch of tickets in his hand, and hope and anxiety on his face.
Poor Lal Singh! He could have had enough happiness, security and stability, if he had tried to live within his means and been reasonable about improving his lot. But his dream of some kind of super happiness, super security, and super stability made him close his eyes to the happiness, security and stability already available to him. He lost the bird in hand and never managed to lay his hands on the two in the bush.
At least a little bit of Lal Singh lives in all of us. So we have to be careful. How do we go about exercising care? The method is simple enough, provided we are simple ourselves. All we have to do is find a quiet corner, stop the roving mind from fishing in the troubled waters of the past and the future, and bring it to a stop in the cool, steady, still pool of the present—and ask this question: “What’s the point?”
When I am not sure whether I should do something, I can ask myself: Is it really worthwhile to do what I am doing? Is what I am doing now connected with what I want to achieve? Is there a better way to do it than how I’m doing it now? Questions like these are implied in that simple “What’s the point?” The more often we ask this question to ourselves, the more of our useless, unexamined, even self-destructive, pursuits we shall be able to get rid of. In addition, this will make us more goal-oriented, transforming our life into a more purposeful, joyful and speedy journey towards freedom and fulfillment.
Life is not just any journey, it is a pilgrimage. People around us are fellow pilgrims. Service really means sharing. We may not be billionaires (yet), but even without that it is possible to share with others what little we have. It doesn’t always have to be money. It could be a little of our time or energy or talents or possessions—used in service of those around us without expecting anything in return. At the least, a few kind words or a smile. If even this is too difficult, goodness gracious!—then what’s the point?
“What’s the point?” is another way of asking the question: “Why?” Read more about it here.