When puberty chooses to hit you, but maturity does not.
I remember being in class 8 and telling my best friend about this boy, who I would always feel shy making eye contact with. And being like a typical lady I would think to myself that have I fallen in love-love? Is this it? Like I am barely 13 years old and I’m imagining him to be my future life partner and the first and last boy I have had an infatuation for.
You would find it hard to deny the fact that the beauty of those days is blurred by the screwed-up decisions that we had taken. We being innocently naïve got ourselves into too many big commitments too soon. And that entire span in which we were supposed to enjoy and lay the foundation of our careers, we had been discovering ourselves and dealing with immature relationships.
One day, fully strangulated by the bag of mental aches I had, and the tides of emotions that were flowing through me, I asked a friend of mine, “Should we never love someone unconditionally?” And no sooner did I ask her, than she typed a magnificent paragraph in front of me, (why not, after all, she is a writer’s friend ;)). Her text rightly said, that we must but not at this age. This is the time for us to weave our passions into full-time employment that can satiate us more than sustaining us. This is the time for us to experience and live through the myriads of painful but inevitable experiences that life is going to through at us and immerse ourselves into the process of understanding ‘what does it want to teach us, rather than ‘why did it happen’. And over the course of us dealing with ourselves, (we have to, no choice!), paying less attention to our partner, would not any day be justified to him/her. For the some of us who would choose to prioritize the partner over our ambitions, we would again not be playing it fair. Everything that comes with a purpose has its own time, but our generation while trying to fast forward it, often loses the balance.
The process of healing surely feels immortal but does get better sometime later. Remember that nothing leaves you until you have realized what it wants you to realize. We surround ourselves with sugar-coated beliefs, feel devastated, and start the cycle of victimizing ourselves. Why, because it is easier to do. But when you do so, you give more power to the tragic times that harm you.
Sufferings are for good. They are an opportunity for change, for growth. People in suffering, create the best from themselves. The more things hurt you early in life, the wiser you become. When you go through tough times, you evolve into a stronger version of yourself. Most importantly, you head somewhere. They open the pathways of questioning your existing self and beliefs, your emotions and all those values that you hold strong conviction in, which you tend to overlook otherwise.
A girl who was depressed for more than a year wanted to seek help but couldn't gather the courage to do so. She wanted to end her life, but couldn’t gather the selfishness to do so either. One day she went into self-realisation. For 20 minutes daily, she started sitting with herself, paying attention to each thought while her eyes closed. She started reading books, and her life took a spiritual turn and changed her personality. She became more jubilant than she had ever been in her life. Otherwise, you find your lives going through the same cycle of emotional and psychological patterns over and over again.
But again, the more we hear about people taking their lives, the more does ending our life seem like the easiest step. But no one who is at the brink of death does not realize that he shouldn’t be doing this, and somewhere in his heart, he would have wanted to be saved, or wanted to not have done this in the first place, but as I said, you’re at the brink. In less than a second, before you realize anything, it takes you to the other side where the power to undo things, does not stay with you.
The idea is to live that misery and heal over time with a mature understanding of the mistakes you had committed and the things that you had not perceived correctly. Be it trusting someone way too much, prioritizing someone way too much, or giving someone close, the power to pull you down.
The idea is to surround yourself with positive energies. When I was dealing with my fair share of pain, I came across someone sharing his experience of this “non-recreational” drug that heals you drastically within an hour, with every single dose of it that you consume. I wanted it too. I wanted to get healed, and I’m sure you do too. But what if I tell you, that the power of that drug lies within you?
It does. Practising meditation gives us the same healing effect bit by bit, every day. It fills us with that much-needed positive energy that is enough to uplift ourselves. It makes us mindful of everything happening around, and largely of our thoughts that govern our responses. It gives us the maturity to know what needs to be cared about and choosing the things that we categorize as “problems” and solving those good problems (running from which never helps). I have experienced it and have felt my attitude towards life-changing.
