Many a time we tend to fall in love with things rather than people. We tend to love things and use people. Many of us feel this way when someone close to us in our family or friend circle lets us down. I do not know why this happens. But it is an experience many of us would have gone through in life, sometime or the other. 

   Let us try to analyse why this happens and if we could do something to reverse it. I think all of us start our career and grow in life. As we grow in life, we accumulate material wealth and equate our prosperity to the value of wealth assimilated. This is quite natural and evolutionary in life for all of us.

  We then reach a stage in life, where material possessions no longer give us joy. We are possibly saturated with material wealth. This could happen for different people at different stages in life. Then we become spiritual and look for happiness beyond materialistic life.

   At this stage, we start appreciating people around us. We are grateful to people who have made us prosperous in life – materially or otherwise. It could be our parents, teachers, friends, relatives or colleagues at work or in business. 

    We are also grateful to many of such people for what we have become today. But sometimes when we encounter someone who is ungrateful, we start wondering whether human beings are more attached to things than people.  We wonder why they love things and use people. But, we hope that everyone loves people and uses things.

   While easier said than done – this is a revelation for us as an individual. It could be a turning point in our own lives. We may look back and reflect on our own lives. We may have also used people and loved things as we grew up in life. So, life is a cycle and may be we need to make mid course corrections as we go along. We may have to seek forgiveness from people, whom we may have used and not loved in the past. We may have to forgive people, who may have used us and not loved us as we think.

    This awakening in us makes us transcend to the next stage in life. We learn from own mistakes and grow in life. We understand the value of and need to “Love people and use things. ” and not the other way around.

S Ramesh Shankar