Love you Zindagi !!

Life is uncertain!!

Sometimes it greets you with good things and sometimes with things that break you. When the bad arrives, we lose hope and have that breakdown. And almost immediately we start thinking about how other people will react and what they will say.

That second part is worth pausing on, because it is strange when you look at it directly. Something painful happens to you, and within minutes a good portion of your distress is no longer about the thing at all. It is about the audience.

Who wrote these rules anyway

Take an example. If a woman has been in more than one relationship, our society is quick to label her. That is simply the general thinking, and it goes unexamined by most of the people repeating it.

So think about buying something. When you go out to buy anything, you look at several options. Agreed? You don’t just take whatever the shopkeeper puts in front of you first. You look, you compare, and then you choose.

So why should anyone not have the right to choose a life partner the same way? It is fine if someone has been in more than one relationship. They have every right to work out what is good for them.

The rules people enforce most aggressively are almost never rules they arrived at by thinking. They are inherited, unquestioned, and applied selectively - usually much more harshly to women than to men, in exactly the same situation.

Once you notice that, a lot of society’s confident opinions start to look far less authoritative.

Don’t hand over the controls

Don’t let your life be handled by others. Don’t live according to what other people want. Don’t become the person you are not. Be yourself. Love the life you are living.

Life doesn’t come with terms and conditions, after all. It is how we make it. Complicated or simple - that is our choice.

I would add one warning I did not know at the time. Handing over control is rarely a single dramatic surrender. It happens in small compliances. You take the safer course because someone frowned. You stop mentioning the thing you love because it got a strange reaction once. Each one is small enough to seem like nothing.

Ten years of those and you are living a life assembled entirely out of other people’s comfort, and you cannot point to where you agreed to it.

When you feel that breakdown coming, say these words to yourself:

Don’t let your past blackmail your present into ruining your beautiful future.

Why ruin your future? We all make mistakes. Everything that happens teaches us something. So learn from it, and love your life.

Easy is allowed

Make the sky your limit. Don’t let anyone else hold the controls. Do what you like and what you love.

You cannot predict the future and you cannot change the past. So why not live the present?

And here is something I believe more strongly now than I did then: it is not necessary to choose the difficult path every time just because you want to do something different.

Somewhere we absorbed the idea that a life is only meaningful if it was hard to get. So people pick the harder option on purpose, then wonder why they are exhausted and no happier than anyone else.

Difficulty is not a measure of worth. Sometimes all you need is an easy choice to be happy.

So try making easy choices for a change, and see how simple life can be.

Whose approval

A closing question, and it is worth actually answering rather than nodding at.

When you imagine other people judging a decision of yours - who exactly is in that room?

Most people, asked to be specific, find it is three or four individuals at most, and often ones whose opinions they do not particularly respect. Sometimes it is someone they have not spoken to in years. Occasionally the room turns out to be empty and the judgement was entirely their own.

That is a very small audience to hand your life to. Name them, and the whole thing loses most of its authority.

-Kashish