CHENNAI: Take our earthly tenure. There is a socially defined blueprint we spend our alive moments trying to fit in. In the process, we are swamped with inputs and feedback, though quite a bit of it comes uninvited. Judgment is such a full time human engagement that it begins to look as if our social and religious edifices are built with the sole purpose of crushing our fragile human spirit. So there are comments, observations and assumptions about your looks, mannerisms, actions, decisions, observances and more... Alterity is undeniably critical to survival, but we never seem to take a break from it. The insidious fillip to this ‘otherness rant’ comes from our notion that we are the centre of our universe.
So that’s where the life finds us, alternating between being martyrs and heroes. Every moment is grand, every twist is personal, and every cut is deeply felt. Thus we stumble through our days with our arm load of pain. All bluff and bluster goes in one breath and we might shed tears in the next, until the day we look under the bed to find the bogey gone. Actually, there never was one in the first place.
Life’s enduring lesson is that most of what you are concerned about is hardly related to you. In fact, it is not about you at all. You barely exist for those whom you credit with the capacity to hurt you. How ironic that we should go through life refuting, explaining, denying and justifying when we are addressing a vacuous space, too caught up with its own self?
But of course, I catch the whiff of scepticism you do not believe me. Well then, recall the last heart-to- heart, clear-the-air session you took the luxury of indulging in. Did it conclude with a life changing affirmative action or are you, as I suspect, back to square one? Did your partner in conversation hear you, see you, acknowledge you or was their lens pointed at themselves?
Sometimes, and rarely, there come along evolved beings that have the periscopic vision of empathy. Quite simply put, they get you! But for the most part, home, office, public turfs are about coming to terms, about lowering expectations, about ignoring stuff, about getting on. The degree varies from one person to another. Somewhere along the journey of life you get to work out how much you are all right giving and taking.
Out of this balancing emerges the flicker of realisation that there is something bigger and a way beyond these negotiating tactics of which, you are a significant wedge or a slice or crumb. In other words, you alone are about you.
Oh! isn’t that a sweet liberty, when the power to change what you think and feel suddenly seems round the corner?
The only thing left to learn thereafter is to tell what is about you and what is not about you at all...
(Neerja is an educator. She blogs at confessionsofanambitiousmother.blogspot.com)