Variety Is the Spice of Life Essay

Outline:

• Spices, imparting taste to food
• Freedom from dullness
• Variety’s definition abuses of a monotonous life

It is not enough that our food should be wholesome; it must be tasteful too. But what is that, above all, which imparts taste, to food? The answer is ‘spices’. In fact, without spices our food will become insipid, lacking in the essential quality of being palatable.

As with food, so with life. Nobody wants to live a dull and monotonous life. What is that makes life free from dullness and monotony? What is it that leads joy and flavour to it? The answer is variety. What spices do to food, variety does to life.

Variety means diversity or, in other words, absence of rigid uniformity. In every sphere of life, major or minor, food, association and even place of residence, from time to time. Even to hear the same song, however enchanting, or to read the same book, however enthralling, would cause boredom before long. Hence out of an instinctive urge from within, man does not like to be surrounded by the same things for a long time much less a life-time. His soul needs contact with ever-changing joys and experiences. Else it dies. Life becomes burdensome and uninspiring and death seems preferable to that state.

Man lives more by the mind than by the body. When, having fallen into a rut, the mind becomes sick and weary; his health begins to give way. The advice for change of climate given by wise doctors springs from the ultimate motive of affording the sick new experiences, new sights and sounds, and new sources of delight because the old have lost their appeal to his mind. Thus variety is also a great healer likewise, in every other sphere of life, variety denied is the soul killed whereupon the body exists only to smart till death steps in to relieve it of the intolerable burden of life.