Some Serious Advice!

Haven’t a lot of us come across this really really annoying person at some point in our lives?

Someone whose values we have hated, whose actions we have judged as improper, whose words we have despised and whose thoughts we have condemned?

A certain someone for whom we set standards so high, that a slight mishap and the house of cards comes crumbling down.

Somehow we find it harder to forgive this one person more than anyone else.

Our relationship with this person goes through a series of love-hate with a hidden vein of insecurity running alongside. Maybe this insecurity is the reason we blow up when we know this person has flawed.

We harbour so much doubt regarding this person that we tend to hold this person responsible for a lot of inconveniences happening around. Even a single flaw from this person’s end and we want to tag him/her over-confident and show him/her the place we think he/she deserves.

Well, we are all not really that cruel a lot, but then with this one person, somehow all our notions of empathy and forgiveness and being supportive no longer hold good.

This one person, is an exception, and this one person is actually the one who resides within us.

Yes. Haven’t we all done that?

When we really had to stand up and be strong, haven’t we resorted to self-doubt and censure, crushing our already wounded self-esteem?

Haven’t we told ourselves a hundred times how we are incapable and could probably not do something worthwhile?

Haven’t we blamed ourselves, for being the worst among the ones around, even though that wasn’t true?

Haven’t we, at some point, cruelly restricted ourselves from venturing out, from expressing a thought, from speaking up, all stemming from the fear that something stupid might come out of our-self, stemming from an immense lack of trust within our-self?

Haven’t we come across a hundred people in our lives with whom we have compared ourselves with, only to find that we were lacking something or the other?

Haven’t we tried to squeeze in the personalities of a lot of other people without giving space for ours to flourish? What is this, but an imposing gesture from within our own-selves?

An act of chauvinism, an act of suppression of the weak by the virile.

We all wait for the weak within us to become strong, without giving it the time to grow, which makes me think the deadlines given by our managers are a tad more generous. Driven by impatience, riding on insecurity we move around, like restless creatures of an unsettling age. Our minds are in a consistent state of flutter, looking for something we are not sure we want to find, wanting something which we don’t know where to look for, a clash of ideals, a throng of paradoxes, this is what our minds are, the minds of the glorious millennials.

Among the many afflictions that we seem to possess, this one I find of considerable interest, maybe because I suffer a great deal from it. We walk ahead and land ourselves in a place we think is where we wanted to be in. I say ‘wanted’, mind you. For, just like how ‘silence’ is broken when we say it, the ‘wanted’ has moved away, maybe not as soon as it was attained, but there sure is a period beyond which it no longer is ‘wanted’. Lucky are those who can prolong it, but so common are those who cannot. We reach where we intended to come, and then look around and then see somebody else somewhere and think , ‘Oh! Why am I here and not there?!’, just like how, while waiting for our nutty fudge to arrive, we wish we had ordered our friend’s blueberry cheesecake instead. Either we are being a nut or the cheesecake was actually the better choice. And again we are assaulting ourselves for placing the wrong order.

‘Time’ is a treasure which we keep locked up from our weaknesses. “Confrontation” is a delicacy we never let our fears indulge in. Ignoring weaknesses, running away from fears, we are constantly moving forward with this bag of insecurities becoming bigger and bigger.

And then when the day is done, like alcoholic husbands, we return home to abuse our inner consorts. Though they cook food for our thoughts and clean up emotional messes, at the end they have to face the irrational alcoholic who wants to find only the flaws. What a sad marriage, between the drunkard and the diligent dame, the one between you and your inner self.

So what makes a marriage work? Love, patience or passion? Or is it tolerance? These words are deceptive, for, with love we tend to expect; with patience we are actually awaiting a change that will happen someday; with passion, we hope for action; with tolerance, we secretly desire acknowledgement.

Then what is the golden word?

Acceptance!

Acceptance does not mean settlement. Of course we will change for the better, but first we will accept everything that we have and everything that we are, as our own, and then we will bring the change, not because we are not good enough, but because change is exciting!

Originally published at kaazhchaa.blogspot.com on July 17, 2018.