The Crisis Defined

Whichever stage of life we might be at, we are always looking for fulfilment of some kind or the other. Eating food, wearing clothes, keeping ourselves safe, educating ourselves, making friends, being in a well paying job, doing something that we enjoy, every action that we take gives us fulfilment. Having said that let me define the different levels of fulfilment with the help of an example using the Abraham Maslo Hierarchy of Needs. We are using food as a means of fulfilment here and how we use different types of food at each level of our need.

Stage 1 – Survival Needs

When we eat food for survival, we eat whatever is easily and cheaply available.

Stage 2 – Self Esteem and Belonging Needs

When we eat food to enhance our self esteem, we eat food that is ate by everyone and is in fashion among our social circle.

Stage 3 – Self Actualization Needs

When we eat food for self actualization, we eat food that is nourishing for our mind, body and soul because we wish to achieve our fullest potential.

The crisis of our world mostly begins either advertently or inadvertently. An inadvertent crisis could come in the name of the following symptoms. It could either be the death of a dear one, the death of a relationship or the loss of a very coveted career/financial opportunity. We feel like we don’t belong anywhere. Our self esteem goes to an all time low. We start an inner war, an unstoppable storm. We do every bit of our effort to quell it down when it seems to settle, but it breaks out from the seams again and again. We hide it behind our smiles, drown it in alcohol, rings of smoke or casual sex but it all stays and sometimes comes back with a potency of a tornado that we can’t seem to handle. This is the kind of crisis that hits people when they are Stage 2 where people are still looking to belong to people, places and work towards a healthy self esteem.

An advertent crisis is not really a crisis. It is the result of naturally completing stage 1 and 2 and organically evolving towards stage 3. It’s like graduation. Yet, we would still like to call it a crisis because it makes us feel that emptiness and incompleteness that we wish to fill up. People in this stage have a happy family, a well paying job, settled children and a picture perfect life. It’s now that they can think about all those things they always felt like doing, connecting with an old friend, painting as a hobby, volunteering in causes that they believe in, having a cup of tea in the balcony in tranquillity or attending that 10 day meditation retreat. All of this starts to flow out from them now.

Whether the crisis is because of an inadvertent disturbance in stage 2 or because of organic growth into stage 3, we are still looking for the same thing FULFILLMENT.

Now that we have understood the process of the crisis, we can now get into understanding, how we can function with the best of our abilities even in times that feel like a crisis.