Life

“Life’s a bitch, learn to live with it”. This cliché has been passed through generations and drilled by society into our heads. And most male chauvinistic pigs define a bitch to be someone who has sex with everyone but them. Just like life seems to work out for everyone but us. Problems never seem to end, and just as we get through handling one set of them, life hurls another set at us. And as we see “the other guy” just sail through what seems to be a walk on a flower bed, we keep wondering why it has to be a bed of thorns for us.

Well, I like to believe in another cliché about life. “Life is a bitter sweet symphony”. Not sure if this is a cliché or the lyrics of some song that a rock star decided to share with us. In any case, in my eyes it’s the truth of life. Life can be as bitter or as sweet as you want it to be. It’s not like the other guy has an easier life than you do, look deeper; all of us are buried in our own shit. Shit that we keep dumping to make our life bitterer and more miserable than what it already is. Learn to live above it. Life will never stop. No one decision can do that, and no one event can do that. [Exception may include the decision of consuming poison, cyanide or walking in front of a train/bus hoping that it will move out of the way.] We grow with our experiences. We learn from them. The dictionary [well in today’s age I used answers.com] defines the word experience as “The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind”. The word itself signifies a growth in our understanding of a situation, of ourselves and those crazy forces that drive us to do what we do.

Don’t ever fear a choice or its consequent result. It’s just a choice. If I give you two random choices and ask you to choose A or B, and promise you that both are good choices, will you be able to choose either. You don’t even know what they are, or what result they will bring. Almost always we eliminate the bad choices at the start itself and what we’re left with are the choices amongst which no one answer is the correct answer. The act of procrastination of the choice may be the worst choice, but it’s still just one choice. You’ll never know what the result of any choice will be till you make that choice.

As far as results and consequences go, they seem to be the single most driving factor in our lives. “What will happen?” this might be the most frequently asked question to oneself. Why fear the consequence so much. It’s just one event in your life, it’s not the end all of your existence. Depending on its relevance, it may shape the direction your life takes for a few hours, days, weeks, months or even years but it’s not going to shape who you are. Where you go in life and who you are will not be dependent on one decision or one result. Remember to decide to keep yourself happy, it’s the single most important decision you can take in your life.

No purpose in mind

Unlike my other articles, this has no purpose. It’s just the collection of some thoughts in my head. There was no reason why I thought about this or why I wrote it.

What does a person want? All of us have an ultimate calling that we search throughout our lives, and for most of us the search bears no fruit. The flow of our lives ends being dictated by the need to be a part of the rat race rather than being dictated by us. There are two breeds of “smart” people that are able to conclude their search. One consists of those who give up and accept the fate of an existence within the rat race, and the other of those who’re fortunate enough to find their “purpose” in life. The most unfortunate souls are those who realize that they want to find their calling but keep struggling with little or no success. Well for now, I fall into this category. If you fall into either of the first two categories then don’t read – this won’t make any sense to you.

There might be loads of situations where we are confused about a choice. There seem to be two paths, each with its pros and cons but each equally enticing. And more often than not the pros of a choice are the cons of the other. What makes us inclined towards both? After all we’re humans - supposedly the most intelligent species. Well according to me, it’s this intelligence that causes the dual wants. I could think of no better illustration of this than the movie “The Mask”. Don’t go “huh?” just yet. What the movie depicted was quite brilliant. It showcased the fact that our brain is intelligent enough to process two alter egos and that’s not a small feat. Stanley Ipkiss and the Mask was the same person [the superhuman abilities of mask put aside]. Our brain is able to process the same options from two different perspectives. You might even from the perspective of two different individuals. Individuals with different wants, different goals and different approaches to this journey called life.

Personally, I have chosen to accept this duality of life with an alter ego approach. I call him Maverick. Harsh is the nice guy who appreciates all the people existing in his life, fights in the rat race hoping to win it someday, and makes sure that he has a smile on his face when he greets the people around him [professional/social commitments after all] no matter how crappy he may be feeling. Maverick on the other hand appreciates his friends and family only, knows he’s capable of moving above the rat race and conquer his dreams, and isn’t two faced with what he feels. The only thing probably common in them is the love for my family. It’s not like they have different goals in mind, after all their eventual goal is my happiness. Their approach is what differentiates them. They each define different paths and different sets of intermediate goals to their eventual aim.

Well therein lays the fact that makes the third category of people the unfortunate souls they become. Unfortunate not becomes they are miserable/unhappy/dying for attention, but unfortunate because their confused. And this confusion is the biggest deterrent to them achieving either of their goals. The contradictory wants end up diminishing the success possible on either of the paths. You never truly take a path because you’re unsure and English has enough axioms that prove that success is not possible if you’re on contradictory paths.

Unlike my other articles, there are no suggestions or solutions for this. I am myself caught up in the struggle to understand myself.

As I close my eyes today

As I close my eyes today,
All I think about is you,
When I turn myself around,
All I feel around is you

Life takes us full circle,
It just goes round and round,
Misery eats us away,
Like a blood thirsty hound

The memories you gave,
Are the reasons behind my smile,
As I close my eyes today,
All I think about is you

I lost a hundred chances,
May ask for a thousand more,
But I’ll always be there,
With an open heart’s door

The touch of your kiss,
A feeling so sublime,
Your dreams are mine to hold,
Till the end of time

As I close my eyes today,
I promise I’ll be there,
There through every life’s hurt,
Your pain is mine to heal.

Today I move on

I saw her standing there across the mall
thought I would go say hi
some time ago my best friend
now just a face in the crowd that I recognize

it won’t be awkward
I convinced myself
after all why should it be?

we’ll have so much to talk about
after all it’s been so long
I told myself

just then I saw my reason to fear
she was with her friends
surrounded by her new life and her new friends
she looked complete without needing me there

I gathered my wits and all my guts
and slowly moved towards her
determined to find my old friend
to find solace in our friendship again

I said hi and she replied excitedly
it’s been so long, she said
she excused herself from her friends
and choose to sit with me for coffee instead

happy, excited and a bit anxious
we chatted for a good hour
the wavelengths matched and so did the moods
but what did not were our lives

it had indeed been a long time
the more we spoke the more I realized
our lives didn’t intertwine anymore
We had each moved into a new realm of reality

the realization struck hard
it saddened me a bit
but then I realized I had been stuck too long
Today I finally move on…

What makes you happy?

What makes a person happy? What makes us want to smile? Most of us search our entire lives for that magic formula that adds self-contentment and zeal; transforming our existence into life.

Putting aside all the cliché answers, any true patron of the movie “Fight Club” would say that it can be anything that makes you tick. As Tyler Durden taught us, there is no limitation on the outlandish nature of our mood controller. For the uninitiated, Tyler got kicks out of ‘selling rich women their fat [that they got removed through liposuction] back as soaps’, ‘fucking Marla till the end of eternity’ and ‘venting out his frustration by fighting’. Strange as it may sound to some; but these things kept him happy. These things ensured that when he got up he had a smile on his face and looked forward to each day like it was his last; consequently living it to the fullest.

Though there are some basic needs that all humans have [e.g. the need for sex], there is one cliché that holds true for most of us – ‘You are unique, just like everyone else’. Each of us have some uniqueness in what drives us, what keeps us happy and what motivates us to do the unimaginable. For ages countless studies have been done to try and decipher what makes someone be him or her. But most if not all have resulted in inadequate conclusions. The sole reasoning behind this, in my mind, is the fact that nobody except the individual can decipher what makes him/her happy.

Friends and family are just travelers who stand beside you to provide any help if needed be, but only an individual himself can figure out the reasoning behind his grieving nature. A forward I read stated that “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full ofgarbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it. And if you let them, they'll dump it on you.” That choice also remains with you.

Most of us spend our time just putting the pieces of our lives together. Trying hard and hoping that someday it’ll make the beautiful picture that we dream of. But just putting the pieces together will never make them stay in place; we need a glue to keep it together. And no one else can provide that to us. Spouses can help us put the glue in the right places, but the glue needs to come from us. This glue is the magic formula that we look for, the list of things that’ll make us happy. Well learning this magic should be the easiest thing in the world especially considering that the spell is within us, we only have to cast it and it has to be casted on us.

But we’re humans and not magicians. We can’t just cast a spell and make everything in our lives fine. Yet, I have chosen to take small steps. Discover things that make me happy. Every day I want to give myself at least one reason to look forward to the next day. It’s not to say I’ll leave aside all planning for a long beautiful life but I need to give myself reasons to ‘live’ it that long. A mere existence for 70 years carries little with it except pain and grief.

Some Quotes I live by

Law of the Garbage Truck - Unknown
Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it. And if you let them, they'll dump it on you.

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause - Unknown

The curtain is lifting. We can have triumph, or tragedy, for we are the play-wrights, the actors and the audience. Let us book our seats for triumph. Theworld is sickened of tragedy.
- John Macauley, Chairman, League of Red Cross, accepting Nobel Peace Prize

Go Out

GO OUT ...

"Damn, I feel like dancing". Most of us associate the want of dancing with happiness. Whenever we are blessed with a reason to add more curves to our smile, we feel the urge to share the happiness. In an internet survey, 8 out of every 10 people have similar events happening to them after this feeling. They go to share their happiness with someone, and invariably that person has something to crib about and blows out their bubble of happiness. How many times has this happened to each of us, all of a sudden we are forced to crash from cloud # 9 flat down to the ground reality of someone else's sadness.

So what do the remaining 2 people do differently? Are the just lucky or are they loved more by the almighty lord. Well though luck sometimes helps us select the right people, to make the correct selection all the time we need to change our thoughts. Those 2 people choose to be happy; they choose to share their happiness with someone who they know will either join them in dance or ask them to come for bungee jumping to celebrate. These are the people who are able to either share your happiness or help elevate you to a higher level of ecstasy. All of us have a big bag of eclectic selection to pick from - our collection of friends - but invariably we choose to select from a very limited set. We constrict our choices to those who we believe should be performing a certain role in our lives. And we may not always be lucky enough to find people who match our hopes. So what do we do then, do we persists with the same hope and often suffer the same disappointment. According to me, the answer to that is " F$#K%$G HELL NO".

GO OUT and you'll be surprised. Explore around, talk to people who you haven't bothered speaking with. Call up an old friend, step out of the normal conversation that you share with a current friend. Don't let your friendship become mundane by the same type of conversation; give him/her and yourself a surprise. Discuss something new; grow your friendship by exploring the new avenues. You may find that there is a lot more common between you and your friend(s). Sometimes we need our relationship with people to be resurrected. Whether you let a friend ferment for sometime [Give space to each other to think] or actively add vigor and spice to give birth to a new equations [Between old friends or with new friends]. Don't let yourself and others ever get bogged down with petty issues, there are 6 billion+ people in this world and you can surely find 10 friends for yourself. And just maybe 1 or 2 [More if you're lucky] of them who will be the ones' asking you to dance for the rest of your life.