Tag: friendship

  • MOTTO FOR THIRTY

    MOTTO FOR THIRTY

    We can breakdown the lifecycle of a person, based on how we expect certain age numbers to mark as a shift in the state of our being. Like, hitting the 18-year mark and expecting the world to take you more seriously, legally. Or that 60-year mark, when your life starts to steer away from the road you have taken all your life and veer into these newer, greener pastures. I think the 30-year mark is the most transformative of the three.

    The 18 year marks the explosive outpour of the youthful energy when you are ready to take the bull by its horns. Whereas the 60-year mark is the goodbye to an old friend, a life long-lived to achieve something you sought, moving on to the new chapter, one filled with fulfilment, contentment and what follows next. But 30-year mark is all about a crucial junction of both; that justifies the person you were at 18 and defines the person you will at 60.

    Being 30 is chalking it out, the tentative plan of your life based on what you have accumulated till now, be it money, career, family, friends, or if nothing else then experience. Your eternal spring of youth now knows its depth. Your excitement knows better than poking some of the beehives that you would have confidently pelted stones at, at 18. You are not there yet and know that the journey is not going to be as breezy or beautiful as you thought it would. You are ready to accept it for what it is, with all of its flaws, and plan to make the best out of it. Being 30 is about acceptance.

    No, I am not 30 yet. I still have a year to go. But trying to understand what lays ahead always takes me back to what all went by. Only by retracing it all I will be able to figure out the way forward. So, with the timer started, I have exactly a year left to figure it all out, or maybe to accept all that has been figured out till now.

    Hence, this year is about fine-tuning my acceptance of situations around me. To address them, acknowledge them, and let it all breathe. Among the long list of things that needs to be wrapped up and tied with a neat bow to achieve it, one thing that’s going to be tricky is the abrupt endings.

    I realised today while talking to my friend that the people who enter your life, the ones with whom you make memories, fall under three categories:

    • The people who continue to be in your life.
    • The people who phased off your life organically.
    • The people who are not in your life anymore.

    The best thing about people who stick with you for long enough is that they stick with you through thick and thin. The years you put under your belt do convert into some amazing relationships, no matter the distance or frequency. Yes, the underlying assumption is the fact that they should be good humans, but I have been lucky in that department. I have friends from all spheres of my life, who have stuck by with me. If we calculate the dissociative tendencies I exuberate at times, I cannot take any credit in this department other than the fact that I tried keeping honesty at the plinth of each of these relationships. No matter how hard the going has gotten, no matter what they wanted to hear, if I have been asked for my honest opinion, I have told them the truth without holding any punches. Maybe it is the trust that has generated from this fact, that it’s not as if I won’t lie to them, but I sure will not if I am asked not to. You not only live your memories with them but also keep creating new ones on the go.

    Then there are people who belong to an alternate timeline now. You have been very close to them in the past, but due to situations, transitions, life in general, you end up phasing away from each other’s universe. Your fondest memories of them, are the recollections that always bring a smile to your face. It always feels as if the entire thing happened a few days, months, maybe years ago, but the truth is that your memories are of your school age, and they are having kids now. You have lived very different lives from those times, are most probably different human beings altogether now, but it fails to deter that smile, that fondness or that warmth that accompany those memories. You know if you cross your paths with them again, all it will take is just a smile to rekindle that warmth from the embers long-forgotten underneath the slumber of the life that happened.

    At last, the ones who have gone, the abrupt endings. You are not talking to them anymore. You may or may not know why. They are people who couldn’t stick and couldn’t phase away. You fell apart at some point, due to reasons known or unknown, but they are defined by the fact that you do not know where you stand with them. If there has been a person that has been close to you ever and is not anymore, and they did not belong to the above-mentioned categories, just put them here. Mostly you will find those people here whom you wish could have moved to the “phased off organically” category. You are in a dilemma because you do not know where they stand in your list, or where do you stand in theirs. When a memory with them hits, you smile, which converts into a frown a few minutes later, wondering what happened. Even if you know what happened, you wonder, if that was supposed to be it? There are some people who are easier than others to shift from this category into the other two. And then there are people who are to be figured out.

    I think my form of acceptance will be complete if I would be able to have zero inventory in the third category. No, it is not going to be easy. Yes, it is going to venture into some territories that might even open pandora’s box. But the best part about communication is that it is two-sided. One-sided communications are just attempts, that are harmless if not replied to. Rather than taking these attempts as an attack on your ego, you should be thankful for the fact that at least you tried, and that was what it meant to you, worth a shot. So you can move on, with a ball in their court. Anyhow, you will have an answer to your question the next time your mind plays a memory of them. If you are lucky enough, you will rediscover some amazing people that were lost as life happened, due to wrongly translated emotions, burdened expectations and situations. Worth a shot?

    As I prepare to enter into my 30s with a year to spare, I want to be ready to be accepting enough for what my future holds, with the confidence that can come only by accepting what my past was. Acceptance about the people you have or have had in your life is just one of the many domains in which acceptance is required. It comes in different variants like your career, your family, life goals, even the meaning of life in general. But these are not the answers I am seeking. Maybe you are, and you should.

    I just want to be ready, so that if I decide to take the bull by its horns sometimes post 30-year mark, I also remember to let it breathe a little and flung me upside down for a while too. After all, it’s my friend for this lifetime, life itself.

  • PHILOSPHY OF PEOPLE AROUND YOU

    PHILOSPHY OF PEOPLE AROUND YOU

    With the wisdom imparted by the age nearing the 30s, which is only going to be dismantled by my experiences post 30, my current understanding of how people in your life appear, disappear, reappear or retain has changed substantially. From bunching the people together from the crowd, like stacking your favourite crayons from the pack, painting every picture in the colour book with them, to creating batches of different people for different phases in life, like the set of clothes you wore two summers ago, are not fit for Goa this summer. The philosophy has evolved deeper by considering the anomalies from both ends of the spectrum.

    People around you can be considered to be a cluster of unique sheep, who even though are unique but their uniqueness won’t cross the foundation of being a sheep. Let’s start it with people being inherently needy and selfish. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But to be okay with it, you need to acknowledge it. After acknowledging it, you need to assess yourself. Only when you know the categories of needy and selfish in which you and the people around you fall, you are better equipped to make rational relationships, that will survive.

    If you are a person who needs someone to discuss things that happens with you to make sense of, you are needy. If you are someone who needs to discuss things at times with others to get just an opinion, you are needy at that moment. If you just share things with people at times as a transaction to what they share, you are pretending to be needy.

    Similarly, if you expect things from people, you are selfish. If you expect things from people because you believe you would do it for them, still selfish. If you don’t expect things from others because one should believe in giving than taking, you are a saint (it exists in individualistic situations mostly). If you don’t expect things from others because there is a chance they’ll betray it, you are self-centered selfish.

    People who think it does not apply when you are in a relationship, it kind of does. That’s what people mean when they say you have changed after being with someone.

    Again, it’s my philosophy, so feel free to pick up what you like, drop what you don’t and make amends where you feel like it for yourself. Or maybe simply discard it and make your own. But the idea behind it is to assess or to predict the behaviour of the people’s interaction with your life.

    As far as I have come to know myself, I don’t relate much with too needy, apart from at times pretending to be one, but I am partially selfish. I tend to be selfish with people until I realize I am being so. Once I know it, I get rid of it, selfishness i.e. If you think that is me riding on the high horse, let me break it down for you a bit further. This act of getting rid of, selfishness towards others, is the greatest possible kind of selfishness I could show for myself. Because the awareness I have towards having any possible dependency on people around me leads me to a place where every act I do seems to come from a place where nothing in return is expected. Which is as wrong as it can be, as what I expect is my peace that comes by not diving too deep.

    This only sounds saintly, but it gives birth to relations that are usually heavily unbalanced. It’s plain stupidity wrapped in nobility to fool people who haven’t witnessed true nobility because growth is always mutual. So the people that I make good long-lasting relationships with, are those who are stupid enough to follow the same school of thought and just distribute with open arms. Luckily, I have found enough to survive.

    Now when you know this profile, you know how long you could handle a person like me in your life. For example, a needy person would love me, but a needy and selfish person would first love me and then continuously put up complaints about my lack of availability and the relation being driven by them, which will not be wrong in essence, but the point they’ll miss is, even without them taking a lead which means dialing down their selfishness, the relationship will still go somewhere. Only the steering wheel will not be in their hand.

    Or maybe a pretending to be needy person, like me, will be perfectly suitable to be around me. But if they are self-centred selfish, it will create an internal clash with their neediness, making it a very shallow relation.
    These are only but two parameters, and there are many more. Like the level of assumptions an individual carry, or degree of openness towards changes. These not only refine the profiling and comparisons better but helps in taking a knowledgeable call about the direction of your relationships with people around you.

    I have tweaked my standing with many people around me based on this understanding lately, and I have yet to find an anomaly that makes me want to tweak this philosophy further. But the bottom line is, it truly is important who you keep around yourself, and why. Even if you don’t agree with anything written above, think about it and maybe come at your conclusion, and you will find your life taking a turn for the best.