A Blog Update and a Lesson in Detachment

The Divine Teacher

Today on the auspicious day of Gita Jayanti, I got an important lesson in detachment.

For more than two years now I have been writing this blog. After almost a year of writing, I discovered that I was beginning to get a small but almost-regular set of readers, many of whom would leave thought-provoking and encouraging comments on some of my posts. It was beginning to feel good, I admit, to see that at least some of what I was sharing was provocative enough (generally in a thoughtful way) for some of my readers.

Well, as things were supposed to happen, today I discovered that all the comments posted on my blog are gone! Disappeared completely. Gone. Who knows where? They are simply lost in the maze of the cyberspace. I discovered that after I published my recent post after a gap of more than two weeks.

The initial discovery was that all the social media shares had disappeared from the blog. No problem, I said, I really don't care about that. That's just a silly ego-boosting thing anyway to know how many people have 'liked' my post on FB, how many times it got shared on G+, how many times on LinkedIn, etc etc. So when I discovered that those social media share links had gone, I felt a sign of relief, almost. Who wants that ego-boosting thing anyway, I said to myself.

But a couple of hours later I was checking something on the blog, and discovered that all the comments from all 271 posts had gone. Just gone. Obviously, I was quite disappointed initially. Because several of those readers' comments were actually quite thought-provoking and added valuable perspective to the content of the original post. I felt sorry for that loss. Initially. I was also angry. Because I couldn't figure out how that could have happened. I have a tentative 'technical' theory, but now I have lost interest in figuring out whether that theory even makes sense.

And after a while it occurred to me that all this was meant to be a lesson in perspective, detachment and equanimity. With so much that is wrong in the world, so much that is unfortunate, unjust, untrue, unethical, unhappy, my silly little loss doesn't matter at all. Nothing in the world has changed because some blog comments are lost. Only my ego has gotten a little rub, much needed perhaps. For that I should actually be grateful. And I am, now.

The auspicious day of Gita Jayanti has indeed become a 'living' lesson for me. A beginning of learning that will hopefully continue. Thank you, Sri Krishna!