Milind is my friend’s son who has grown up in the first world. His mother Sapna wants him to experience the different shades of India. Milind agrees and takes an internship in a social organisation. As a result, the mother-son duo land in a beautiful green coastal small town by the Bay of Bengal. While it is charming, but Milind is now terrified as his mother will leave and he will be left to survive in a place that is opposite of anything he imagines as a comfort zone. From language, food and payment issues to electricity, mattress quality, transport and social life, everything on earth, seems difficult to manage, for him.
Sapna is also concerned but there seems to be something larger than logic that propels her to let her son go ahead. She takes in his forlorn face, steels her tender mother’s heart and drives away in the taxi. Later, she calls me and we talk about how Milind is nervous.
I think about myself today. Of all the small and big things that make me nervous, some are mundane everyday matters but I have to train my body to cope with such situations. And in sensing that gap, fear, nervousness and procrastination, I have to become a new version of myself to deal with it. It could be a simple completely benign matter of a meeting with my own staff for the maintenance of my small farm, yet, there is nervousness that I may not be present enough or others may do something inappropriately etc.
Old beliefs lock me in mediocrity while old patterns of nervousness, that I know to be toxic, feel like old familiar friends. What helps is that I throw myself in the deep end, out of my comfort zone!
They say that most of us have two main fears — abandonment and fear of being overwhelmed. Every day little by little, we must break the stale old belief that external life is too big, scary and overpowering and that we are little in front of such difficult scenarios. Every day, let’s get to know ourselves — our depth, diversity, relentlessness, and invincibility. For that’s what who we are, humans with potential that stretches to infinity.
And for the younger ones, like Sapna, let us learn to let go and enable our little ones to learn about their magnificent and endless potential. Do we believe Milind will be a changed young man in two months? Who knows...
Anupamaa Dayal
This fashion designer is about happy clothes and happy homes for happy women