Ripple Effect…

I was talking to one my best friend about consequences in life. The stuff that we do has some kind of ripple effect on our lives which plays out at the end. He felt that it is not necessarily true. His argument was simple. We sometimes do not live long enough to experience that ripple effect. And even if we do feel it, we usually do not recognize it as the ripple effect of our previous actions. Even though there is some truth to that statement, I always felt that we do feel those ripple effects and we do know, sub-consciously, that is the effect of that.

In physics the third law of motion states:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It applies to our lives as well. Depending on the type of “actions” we feel the ripple effect immediately or sometime later. Some of these result in good outcomes and some doesn’t.

Why do we do the things that we do? A question which I feel is itself a paradox. If we do not do the things that we do we don’t feel human. Sometimes we do it out of necessity and sometimes we are forced to do it. But it is likely that we do it almost 90 percent out of necessity. Why is that? well, one conclusion that I can reach is related to how we want to be perceived in this World.

We, most of us, want to lead life mostly the way we want. We want to be perceived in a certain way, and be accepted in the society. But sometimes, most of the times it does not go the way we expect it to. And when it doesn’t we feel sad, depressed and spiteful at times. There lies our problem. Despite our ability to adapt and ability to think, we fail to utilize that unique ability. We fail to understand what went wrong and start to blame on things which are either not in our control or on some one else for our actions.

We start acting irrationally. We do things (action) which don’t even make sense to us, but we do it anyway. Because we feel that it might somehow make things right and everything goes back to normal. But what we fail to understand is that those just add to the complications and more importantly these actions have consequences. This creates the ripple effect. This ripple effect is long-term (usually) and when we come to face that in reality, that is when we feel the effect of it. A Reaction if you will.

This applies to our lives – how we manage our relationships with others, how we deal with certain situations, how we handle work pressures and so on. Most of us know understand things much better and to a certain degree feel sub-consciously to act otherwise and yet fail to apply these “in-built” information to our lives.

One of the conclusions that I feel is likely to explain this is linked with our perception towards life. We never tend to perceive Life as a unique journey, through we are supposed to learn something meaningful and maybe try to understand our purpose of why we are here. Rather we perceive Life as a string of events that is carefully monitored and reflected back our society, which we need to pass every event with flying colors. We need to reflect on our lives and focus on the type of “ripples” we create. Because ultimately it is we who face them and it just doesn’t affect us, but it also affect others around us who might be an unwilling victim of our actions.