Moh
February 2, 2016: One of the teachings in Sikhism is to learn to control “moh” – being too attached to or involved in someone or something. I always thought that this can happen more often with other people – your friends, parents, siblings, partner, children etc. However yesterday I got reminded of how you can become too attached to a thing.
My mobile was on reparation and when I got it back this Saturday, I got to know that all my pictures, contacts, messages, music, recordings – actually EVERYTHING – had vanished. I knew I had some of the pictures on my computer, but realized that I hadn’t any backup of the latest on my computer – like the pictures of when I went to India this time, which I thought to share with you all once my mobile was all well again. I felt completely lost, like I had lost something very important.
When I gave it a second thought, though, I was surprised over how attached I was with this technical little thingy, and thought about the practical use of having all these memories captured, recorded or written. Yes, I had a lot of precious memories captured in pictures, but how often did I actually look at these pictures? How often did I use to listen to these recordings?
Now it looks like I am against capturing or recording memories and using mobile. Well, that’s not the case. Some things are precious and nice to look back at – like I had a recording of my nanapapa and nanimama doing path, which I would love to look back at. The mobile is useful, but there have to be a balance in how attached I am to it. Just like people are here for a temporary stay, so are the things around you. We can’t expect that the money, the pictures and recordings captured will go with us. If we react like the world is doomed if we lose everything on our mobile, that could be a sign that we are too attached to it.
A challenge in our life could be to figure out the difference of being attached to someone or something, and when we are too attached to someone or something. A way to do that could be to monitor our reactions whenever we are in a situation where our relation to that someone or something is threatened in some way – like we are in fear of losing them/it, they don’t have time for us (maybe more applicable when we talk about people or it could be applicable when our mobile is on reparation :p) etc. From today I will try to monitor my reactions more. Will you do the same?
