DWA

Life of Pi: The Symmetrical Sea

Author's Note: This is my summative Life of Pi essay. Ever since we finished reading Life of Pi, my support group and I have been working on these essays. At first, just the thought of composing a paper this immense overwhelmed me to the point where I struggled just to get my thoughts together. After almost a month of feeling like I was going nowhere, I realized that all that time was just how long I needed to simply gather my ideas. Once I had my organization laid out and my thesis developed, my essay was easier than I thought it would be. I used a sophisticated, systematic approach to organization. When I completed my paper, I decided to use it as my DWA in addition to using it as my Life of Pi summative essay. I feel really strongly about my topic and how it relates to the novel.

Love and self-absorption, satisfaction and desperation -- they are complete opposites, yet vital for everyday life. As human beings, we strive for the best in life. We constantly want to be happy and enjoy life to the fullest. When struggles are apparent and we are temporarily in discomfort, it's hard for us to see the pleasures that are around us. Though sometimes our ability to see the whole situation is marred by our current problems, each one is necessary for us to grow and learn from. Without pain in the world, the most desirable pleasures in life would be impossible to grasp.

The main opposites within this world are pleasure and pain. Both are very simplistic thoughts. There is a physical and emotional side to each of them. In Life of Pi, Pi found pleasure in the beauty of the natural word. He delighted in the randomness of how the flying fish sailed through the air in the moment when he needed food the most. He thanked God for such a physical pleasure: food. When he killed the dorado to prepare his meal, he experienced another kind of joy. "The dorado did a most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled."(p. 185) This magnificent sight gave Pi a sense of happiness, and showed him that even in the middle of difficulty pleasure could be found.

Pi emotionally satisfied himself through daily prayers and mediation. Through his search to find God he attained contentment. As he kneeled on his prayer rug reflecting on himself, he fulfilled his need to know the truth and found enjoyment through that. When he was stranded at sea, some of his greatest comforts were when he praised God for the simplest things. Even though he had so many reasons to be upset, he gave thanks for the things he could. Through relaxation and mediation Pi achieved mental pleasure.

When we get a compliment or have a good meal, we find simple gladness. When we spend time with loved ones -- family or friends -- we get a feeling of relaxation, almost contentment. It emotionally fills our need to be loved and to love, and it physically satisfies our love of comfort.

In Pi's life pain was most evident when he was alone at sea. At first, he felt an emotional discomfort of abandonment because he had lost his family. As time passed, he physically endured pain. Hunger, thirst, and lack of sleep were constant struggles Pi faced in the lifeboat. Even his skin burned with rashes from the salt water. Difficulties surrounded Pi as the days passed by to the point where he lost his ability to see and to walk.

We tend to see pain in the world more often than we see pleasures. We think we are in so much trouble when one little thing goes wrong that we can't even distinguish the pleasures that are present. Sometimes the greatest delights are what we can't see through our tiny discomforts. When someone offends us or is unjust to us it is hard for us to look past it and realize we still have the best joys in life: food to eat, a place to call home, and people to love.

Though pain is despised and pleasure is desired, logically, the two are inevitable. Every action in life is either a pain or a pleasure. In Life of Pi, Yann Martel illustrates to us how both are essential. When Pi became stranded at sea his struggles were more apparent than his pleasures. He had a hard time seeing past his need for food and his thirst for water, much less his desires for someone to rescue him. After many days of mourning on the lifeboat, Pi began to look past these difficulties and delight in the natural world and the beauties that he had never cared for before. When his journey in the ocean ended, Pi finally realized just how wonderful certain things in the world were. Even though we often reflect on the painful aspects of life rather than the pleasurable ones, there is an equal balance in the world.

Often our ability to see both of these forces as equivalent is marred because we believe that in our current situation pain is only present. Sometimes just the opposite is true; the predicament we are in is what we need to fully appreciate the pleasures we have. Often, it just takes that difficult situation to help us truly see all the wonders in this world that we take for granted. In the beginning of the book, when the author met Pi in person he took note of how much Pi cherished the feel of the warm dough in hands and how he ate only the tastiest meals. "He's an excellent cook … He makes me the most zesty yet subtle macaroni and cheese I've ever had. And his vegetarian tacos would be the envy of all Mexico." (p.24) Only after Pi had gone through his traumatic experience on the lifeboat was he able to see food in this way.

An ancient Chinese concept that helps explain the need for a balance of pain and pleasure is Yin Yang. Yin and Yang are two complementary forces in the world that work together to create balance. In the image, both Yin and Yang are necessary to complete the picture. Without one another the image could be incomplete. Some say that one is good and the other is evil, but ultimately those are man-made names given to these two forces. Neither one is considered better than the other. They are both simply opposites like pain and pleasure where both rely on the other to create balance.

A main controversy that has been brought up throughout ancient history is: why do we have pain in our lives? God gave us the Bible to help us better understand the answers to these questions. Through the story of Jesus, the Bible illustrates for us why we need pain. Jesus had to endure a lot of discomfort in his life time. He was constantly ridiculed and everyone always tried to prove him wrong. In the end, he was whipped, forced to wear a crown of thorns, and crucified on a cross. Jesus never seemed to oppose his trouble because he knew that it was the only way to show us that God truly loved us. Jesus knew that there was no other way to demonstrate God's deep, everlasting love than to die for us.

God made the ultimate sacrifice, to show us why we need an equal balance of pain and pleasure in life. He gave us these difficulties in our lives so we too could express our love for other people. Love is such a hard concept to grasp that words sometimes fail us, so God provided a way for us to tell one another that we sincerely love them. If the world didn’t have this evil force, it would've been impossible for God to show us that he loved us more than anything else. We need pain to experience the best pleasure in the world: love.

When Pi came across the island in Life of Pi, Yann Martel showed us what happens when we try to avoid balance of these two forces. All of Pi's needs were met on the island -- clean water, fresh food, and solid ground. Though it seemed like the most desirable place during the day, when the sun set it turned evil and poisoned everything on it. Before he knew about that, Pi weighed the option of forgetting about making it to the shore and just staying on the island. He wanted to desert his current situation of pain for a life of pure pleasure. Little did he know, someone else had made that decision, too. Pi came across his remaining teeth on the island, and made the assumption that the person must have just slowly faded out of the world without anyone knowing about it. Pi realized that to live a life of on that island would be like not living at all.

He realized that we need to do hard things to make our lives count. At the end of the day, it is not our comforts, but our hardships that makes us who we are. Without going through struggles we would have no successes, no accomplishments, and no legacy to leave behind. We need to continue to push ourselves to experience true joy. Through the island and Pi's struggles, Yann Martel tells us that the best pleasures in the world are the ones that can only be experienced after going through pain.

In the end, it isn't our troubles that are remembered, but the way we overcame them. People who give up and lose hope slowly fade out of this world, but people who endure hardships are revolutionized. We were not meant to always be happy; we were meant to make an impact on the world. Sometimes, in order to do that we must first go through a rough time to fully understand the world around us. Only when we can see all the pleasures surrounding us can we make a real difference in the world. Our impact can be as simple as expressing our love for one another. Though it seems easy, love is one of the most challenging aspects of life to demonstrate. It is vital for us to have pain in the world in order to help us complete this task of loving one another.