The Parachute of Realization.

I made a parachute yesterday.§

This parachute came to be the most important piece of advice I had ever come across.

Let me explain:

Yesterday was Krishna Janmashtami. I was in Bharuch at that time. I was helping my Uncle (Mama) set up decorations for the gully's local temple. He had brought a bag of flowers to hang. After hanging the flowers, I was left with a rather decent-sized low-density polyethylene bag.

Growing up, I was an ardent lover of parachutes. I had always wanted to go skydiving but never had the chance, so I used to resort to making my own parachutes out of plastic bags.

I used to just grab a Walmart shopping bag, hot glue some Nylon strings to it, tie one of my Lego Minifigures to it, and just drop it from the 3rd floor balcony. It often just got stuck and did not deploy, but the times that it did deploy brought me joy that 8-year-old me could only express by biting my own father for not throwing the chute properly...

Now yesterday was not much different, except that I had become a completely different version of myself. I had learnt to think in systems, and I had an insane patience level... I also worked meticulously and was hyper-focused. I had a goal. I had a vision. That vision, I did not expect, would give me other visions (foreshadowing).

I learnt how to make a parachute by cutting instead of gluing. I cut out a very, very weird, mutated 8-leaf-clover-looking shape from the LDPE bag, and I melted 8 concerning holes into the bag to serve as the anchors for the strings. Then I proceeded to cut 8 equal lengths of SEWING THREAD and reinforce the holes in the LDPE cutout with strips of masking tape.

There were an unfathomable amount of mosquitoes targeting my chiseled quads and calves and causing me to itch the bites violently, hence I decided to turn on the fan at max speed, which caused all my tied sewing threads to tangle....

Those threads took 1 hour of my life to attach. 1 WHOLE HOUR!!!!!!!!

I lost it. So much for insane patience level and calm mind.

I become primal, uncivilized, and let out a guttural yell that can only be described as an orangutan strangling a vomiting gorilla having a seizure and wailing because its child died...

I knocked down a couple of chairs, ripped a newspaper, and hit the sofa's armrest with my Biology textbook until the cover ripped.

Father came running down and confronted me. He asked me what happened. I was not in the slightest of a mood to listen, but nevertheless, I had to listen. He asked me why I did it, what did I get from doing it? What was I going to do so that this would not happen again, and much more.

Then my father went back up and I finished my parachute, but this time with a new and thicker string that would not tangle.

I tested the chute. It worked.

After 2 and a half hours of iterating, typing, cutting, and knotting, my parachute worked.

I should have been satisfied. The parachute worked. I had solved the problem. I had learned what went wrong. I had even found a better way to build it. So naturally, I decided to reflect on it. I told my father I was going to write about what had happened. He laughed.

“Not everything needs to be reflected on.”

I started going down the rabbit hole of overthinking. I realized that after I started blogging and writing, I started to think that every small thing had a meaning. I thought that there was something deeper to everything. Anything I felt was unique and deserved to be reflected on, I wrote about. That's how "The Art of Being Alone" came into existence. I thought solitude was deep.

I once saw a dog biting a man and went straight into the deeper meaning:

"The dog might be going through a lot? Maybe his wife left him, his kids hate him and he lost his job as the group security guard because he had a barking injury?"

This is exactly the problem.

I had written an entire article about solitude because I thought it was profound. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe I just really wanted it to be. And that got me thinking. Maybe reflection itself isn't the problem. Maybe the way I was reflecting was.

There is a difference between looking back at something and asking, “What can I learn from this?” and looking back at something and desperately asking, “What does this mean?” The first one is useful. The second one can become a rabbit hole.

I had somehow started believing that everything needed to have a deeper meaning. Every experience had to teach me something. Every emotion had to reveal something about myself. Every strange coincidence had to be some hidden message waiting to be decoded. And the worst part? I enjoyed it. It made life feel more interesting.

A boring Tuesday wasn't just a boring Tuesday anymore. It was an experience. A bad conversation wasn't just a bad conversation. It was a lesson about human relationships. Getting angry wasn't just getting angry. It was an opportunity to analyze my emotional state and discover some profound truth about myself.

I was turning my own life into a documentary. And maybe that isn't entirely a bad thing.

Reflection is one of the reasons we learn. If I had never thought about why I lost my temper with that parachute, I might have simply done it again. My father's questions forced me to look at what I had done and ask myself what I could change.

But there is a point where reflection stops being useful. You can stare at something for so long that you start seeing things that aren't there. And I think that's what I had started doing. I wasn't just looking for lessons anymore.

I was looking for meaning. And apparently, my brain had decided that everything deserved some. That is a dangerous habit. Because if everything has meaning, then nothing is allowed to simply exist. A dog can't just bite a man.

No.

There must be a reason. Maybe the dog had a troubled childhood. Maybe he was abandoned. Maybe his wife left him. Maybe his children hated him. Maybe he lost his job as the neighborhood security guard because of a tragic barking injury. Maybe— Or maybe the dog just bit the guy. And that is when I started questioning something much larger.

Why do we do this? Why do human beings feel such a strong need to explain everything? Why can't something just happen? Why does a failure have to be a lesson? Why does suffering have to make us stronger? Why are we so uncomfortable with the possibility that sometimes, shit just happens?

Maybe there isn't always a grand explanation waiting for us. Maybe there isn't a hidden purpose behind every event. Maybe the universe isn't writing a story about us. Maybe we're the ones writing it. And that realization scared me a little. Because if meaning isn't something that exists everywhere around us, waiting to be discovered, then perhaps meaning is something that we create. And if we create it... Then perhaps we can also create it where there was none.

Which sounds beautiful. Until you realize how easily that can go wrong. Because suddenly, the same brain that can find meaning in friendship, love, art, ambition, and life itself can also find meaning in a tangled piece of sewing thread. And perhaps that is where the balance comes in. Reflect enough to learn. Don't reflect so much that you start inventing.

Maybe that's the Goldilocks zone. Not zero reflection. Not endless reflection. Just enough. And perhaps that applies to meaning itself. Maybe we don't need to find meaning in everything. Maybe we just need to decide what is worth giving meaning to.

We look at a mountain in the sunlight and call it beautiful. We look at a pig covered in mud and call it ugly. We look at a painting and call it meaningful. We look at a piece of music and call it emotional.

None of those objects came to us and asked:

“Hey! What is my meaning?”

We just gave them one. This is human nature.

We observe the world, interpret it, categorize it, judge it, and attach significance to it. We do it so naturally that we rarely even notice we're doing it. And if we can do this with mountains, paintings, animals, and parachutes, then what happens when we turn that same machinery toward our own existence? This brings us to our final topic:

Existentialism.

Existentialism is, in a way, the realization that there may not be some grand meaning assigned to our existence. There may be no hidden purpose, no universal instruction manual telling us what our lives are supposed to become. And maybe that is not something to fear. Maybe meaning is not something we are supposed to find. Maybe it is something we create.

We spend so much of our lives trying to understand why everything happens, when sometimes the better thing to do is simply experience it. Reflect when reflection is useful. Search for meaning when meaning matters. And when something is just a parachute, let it be a parachute. Not everything needs a meaning; sometimes, existence itself is enough.

This has made me realize that I don't need to reflect on everything. I don't need to write about everything that happens in my life. Not everything needs to be profound. Sometimes?

It can just be about me vibing to Danza Kuduro at 3am in the morning.

Life is meant to live. Enjoy. Have fun. Not become the next Marcus Aurelius and dedicate your life to stoicism and existentialism.

Maybe the meaning of life isn't to find meaning in everything, but to live enough that you don't need one.§

-Vihaan Vaghela