Simple things that are hard to understand…

We can divide things in life into those things that are priced and hence easy to understand their values and those things that are priceless and are counterintuitive to understand their values. If you walk into a hotel, it is really easy to get the type of service that your pocket allows. The prices are printed along the list of the foods in the menu. If you want rent a room in a hotel, again you know the room’s rent and the cost of room services. You get what your pocket allows. It is not only commodities that are priced. These days the advice, “The professional advice” are priced too. We see the flourishing businesses of consultancies, from preparation for job interviews, finding and locating jobs to education (especially scholarships) to marriages and to solving problems in administration, literally everywhere and at every stage of life. In short it is easy to be clear about the type of services and commodities one can get when they are priced. However, not everything in life is priced. There are a lot of things that are priceless and they make us to get puzzled in determining their values. Here things get tricky as only thing that compensate the missing prices are sincerity. No one can price them. It is not just a tradition but a need, a human need. Take for example the services and help that we get in home and from friends. They are priceless. No one ever ask or expect anything in home or among close friends. They do and get because they have to.
For long times, Biologists try to explain these priceless services in terms of altruism. They have devised game theories to determine their prices. I am not saying that these studies are none-sense. They make us understand a lot of behaviors yet they aren’t able to explain satisfactorily as there is no unit of measurements (genes lose their meanings where higher cognition is at work)……….
Coming back to our original discussion that priceless services and attachments are hard to understand and a lot of times are confusing so it is expected that even highly educated people mess up from times to times in their lives. In fact the messing up has increased as we are losing the practical education that we used to get from our traditional ways, through our families, culture and traditions. The elders were the sources of wise advices (and of course free of cost and were always availability), mediations and in times of need taking the charge to manage things. By coming of Google, these traditions are eroding. When we think that we are wise enough that we can deal efficiently with priceless things or relations, we are only deceiving ourselves. It is no something that you do research and become a Guru. It is something that you need to learn their values through life experiences as they are counterintuitive.
We have lost the tradition of old mastership where the teachers were aware, how to teach the value of priceless things in life. They were aware that it is not going to come from books. It comes only from experience so in cases that they were finding their students are undervaluing the priceless things in life; they were making their students leave them. Of course it was hurting their students. It was even hurting the teachers (whoever were playing the role of teacher; an elder, may be a guardian). But they had to suffer in order to learn that there is no price that compensate for it.
We find it in modern literatures also but we mostly ignore to learn from. Let me not recommend an easy and enjoyable one. If you haven’t watched the movie, “Undefeated”, I recommend to watch it. It is the story of a boxer who climbs the ranks very fast and think that the only worthwhile thing is money and find at the end that there are things in life that have no price. Of course the literature is filled with such kind of stories however, the real lessons that we get, come from life itself.
In nutshell, it is not recommended to use calculators in things that are priceless as there is no calculator that can tally their value…………