Beyond the Bounds of Certain and Uncertain

FMS#372 || Faridabad-NCR || June 2019

Can we agree that the question of ‘what life will be’ is always an open question?

For everyone?

Yes. Open for everyone, at all times.

So are you saying that nothing is certain?

Well done friends! What a cool conversational gambit. My lemonade seems warm in comparison!

There you go again, trying to sidetrack our conversation with irony. This isn’t about certainty, surety, uncertainty, unpredictability. Something else is at stake.

Ok. See life beyond ideas of certainty and uncertainty. So then, how else? Ok, the future is open. I agree intuitively with that. And then?

We do see each others’ ferment. Sometimes it feels like we are all engines. Whenever we see even a small dip in another’s ferment we ask, where is your spirit? What is making you feel discouraged?

Well, my friends mostly tell me I am as if in a space shuttle.

Well, we can see that. You never have an air of despondency hang over you. A thought strikes me: To keep open the question of what life will be, is something that needs nurturing between and practice by all.

You’re saying that asking another about the loss of their engine-fury comes from a shared terrain of intimate affinities.

And where does this shared terrain come from? I’m not asking rhetorically. This question really does crop up in my mind often, navigating the places that we do, with their uncountable people and millions of practices.

It’s an elegant and large question. A mystery, a riddle. The kind that gets flush with new tides of energies with every incident.

How?

Don’t you feel that, on the assembly line, all of us could swing to a un-predictable rhythm—resonating with each other, unknown to each other—at any time? In a strange way we feel it, we can even claim that we know it, and sometimes we even speak it. This is probably what keeps the question, ‘what life will be’, open.

You might find this a bit out of context here. But do listen. In the factory in Manesar, I feel very cold while I work, even in this heat of May. The new machines, the new robots — they seem to need 16 degrees to be stable, otherwise it is said that there will be havoc. We are given training in yoga to help us adapt to new robot ways. And when I come out at the end of the day, friends say it’s all fun for you, you don’t have to sweat. And I say that I’ve done too high a production, too high.

So, what is this about?

The story is that I am really confused. Work is changing. The design of work, the way of work is changing. The logic of wage doesn't register in any meaningful way. What’s the calculation based on, I don’t get it. I do work equivalent to my wage in about one minute, maybe two.

What you are saying? Are you talking about possibilities? Are you saying the radius of our conversation is limited? Are you saying the ground has shifted?

What I’m probably saying is that the word ‘life’ itself has to be thought differently.

FMS_372_Jun2019 by baatein1 on Scribd