Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to grow up, deal with my problems independently, be financially stable, and give a lot of presents to my loved ones without having to think of the money to get these gifts. At 23, I am halfway there – living in a city quite far from home, living in a room which I can call my own, paying my bills (partially), and of course, showering my loved ones with occasional gifts and cards. But what I didn’t expect my twenties to be was this huge mess of emotions - a mixture of calm and chaos, and an almost comfortable feeling of uncertainty and unpredictability that makes me question every single decision I take, be it wearing that short but comfy dress, or applying for that placement job in the city I like but with a pay too less. Life decisions are only getting complex, and I have realized that being in your early twenties can be challenging (just as being an adolescent felt some years back). And if I think of it now, the sixth standard seemed so much worse than the fourth, and twelfth was way more horrendous than the tenth, but while in eight, the tenth boards were all we dreaded. Perhaps what I’m trying to suggest here is the increasing level of complexity at every stage of life where we are taken uphill, to our own Everests, at our own pace, with our individual set of problems which we deem ‘challenging.’ Interestingly, all these levels seem like the MOST DIFFICULT THING WE HAVE TO DO IN LIFE until it's done and dusted and we are confronted with the next level of difficulty – don't you feel that all this is an endless loop?
You may be
in your teens and be worried about getting into the right institution for
higher education, or you may be in your early twenties and contemplating what
to do after you graduate (much like me). You may be a person being pressurized by family and society
to ‘settle down’ or you might be a married individual starting a family. You may
be a young, clueless parent certain about what not to become as a parent and
yet finding yourself clueless as to how to be all that you missed in your own
childhood, or you might be a person struggling to find your identity without
the job, or person you thought would be a defining character in your life – all the
struggles we can possibly list, are as difficult as we feel them to be and we are right in feeling that
the world doesn’t understand the quandary we are faced with, at any given time. It's all valid, and yet what we tend to forget is the potential we carry within
ourselves to overcome each of these challenges.
I feel so lost right now because life doesn’t get easier for me (or anybody for that matter): it only gets intense. I’m 23, soon I’ll be out of college and still wondering what to do with my life while trying to be happy at the success of people around me and attempting to console those who may have had harder fates than mine. We are all doing the best we can. I have a million things to say about this phase of not knowing where we are headed and yet being in love with the imaginations we have of the future, the recurring questions we feel upon seeing people live our dreams, and still finding ourselves miles away from being anywhere near that vision. But hey, this post isn’t about me or my realizations, it's neither about you, it's about life, and its consistent attempt at making the puzzle more and more complex for people - for you and me.
The complexity shall remain
but learning the art to smile between those difficult hours, rediscovering ourselves, and finding a sense of contentment with how far we’ve come and where we are headed is
what the objective of this maze is. Life’s maze ends when we die, but until
then, all those days that feel shitty, when the world seems boring, and our
chores seem pointless, when people seem mean, and loved ones sound annoying - all these nasty days are to be heaved out. I’ve
realized that breathing these dark days out is the key to reaching all those
hopeful days when we feel like we have achieved what we wanted to, or found
answers to the questions that always bothered us. And if reaching that optimistic feeling means taking a step back, re-learning a lesson we might have forgotten, re-working on our basic values, or going back to a mechanism that previously worked for us, then what's the harm in taking such a step back, right!? After all, reaching our Everest isn't always about taking steps forward, sometimes, a step back can become the push needed to take ten steps ahead!
