Thursday, January 2, 2020

On striving for the ever-elusive balance

Life is strange, unpredictable, and yet cyclical. Things crop up again and again, people unexpectedly behave the same way, and there is a perpetual sense of deja vu. Blogs are a curious study in people, and their evolution. Yet the constant factor in all things good and bad is one's own self, in a way. I am so different from the person of ten years ago, and yet crucially the same.  Maybe I myself am the reason behind everything- how can something change in my life when I am the one who perpetuates, disturbs, and records everything?Of course, there are some stark differences. I happen to have lost one of the things I loved most dearly in my life-my hair, yet I am deemed pretty at times. Compliments from the other gender are always suspect, and in Pakistan they can be downright inappropriate, but a random lady at a McDonald's told me that I have beautiful hair and I think she meant it.My relationship with the world has changed fundamentally due to my becoming downright popular as compared to the unknown creature I used to be. Of course, I am nowhere near the end of the spectrum where it would be socially acceptable for me to ignore texts, but let's say that I have had a few chats with a few people who felt like talking to me. As can be expected, this was an entirely unexpected situation for me, and I had no idea how to handle it. I suspect it kind of got to my head, as a little popularity would go to one's who never found a single person interested in listening to her.As with everything else, I have a love-hate relationship with the world. I accept that one can't live without it 24/7. I need people to prepare my food, brew my coffee, drive their car for me and run an organization where I can drop in at 9 and leave at 5 to pick up a pay check and pay the said people for their services along with a thank you and a smile. A tip, if they were polite to me and prepared my food well.Things are stupid and pointless once you start looking at them closely, but this is the idea every seventeen year old stumbles upon as a rite of passage and whines about for the next decade. At my ripe old age of twenty-eight, one gets tired of crying and inevitable asks oneself, so what? What next? The question is hard to answer, but at least it is a step in the right direction. Recently I have started asking this and realized a few things:1. My standards are actually too high, at least in terms of expectations from human behaviour. People are flawed and stupid and selfish. They have an indelible mark of the culture of deceit and scarcity that has plagued our part of the earth for centuries and it is still the way things work here.2. Essentially I am just a small pipe for funneling money, since I just throw away precious hours of my life for one organization and throw away the peanuts I get in the bank account of another. Just moving money around. One does need it for essentials and to have the right amount of money is very liberating but I get sick to my stomach of being a pipe. Of course there is my morning coffee which is often the only source of happiness in my life and I'm probably going out to dine on a whim because I love that place and hate my life but it is all too easy to fall in the trap of bigger and bigger numbers. The idea of dining alone in restaurants in Isb, all dolled up and single, merits an entire post. 3. Balance is the most elusive thing for me-ever. Plus it will probably remain that way. Finding the right amount of world in your life and keeping it there-that is one hell of a job. One I constantly fail at. I tell people that I don't talk a lot, and they are surprised because they find me articulate and talkative. Ah well, some people.I took a 24 hour break and totally lost my train of thought. Apart from my narcissism, the ever-constant factor, I think my lack of stability is a huge pillar of support in my life. Strangely enough, your weakness can be your strength if you are aware of it, take pains to balance it out and utilize it skillfully. If I have learnt anything from my 5-year long mid-life crisis, it is that things are what they are and you can't run away from yourself. My anxiety that destroyed my stomach, spoiled my mid twenties and made me go almost bald was caused by a host of underlying unresolved issues. I think I was trying to run away from them, but I am pathetic at lying-to myself and to the world.My issues still remain unresolved, but at least I have acknowledged them. I still lack stability in my life and I shouldn't be too hard upon myself for it. Acknowledged that I have become fond of dining out and going to the cinema and my career has been on the back burner for quite some time, but hey, everyone needs to blow off steam in one way or the other. My melancholy still lingers, but I have chosen to embrace it once again, along with solitude. Let this be a lesson to me never to start relying on someone else, or to start looking for support from the world, for it will invariably disappoint. I must concede that human contact has a part in civilization and there is a human aspect to life, but it is vital to cede enough place to the world and nothing more. People bring a breath of fresh air in your life, a new and unexplored point of view and in rare cases a modicum of understanding and generosity, but far more frequently they bring toxicity, baseness and mediocrity alone. Maybe it isn't that way for most of the people and maybe they can interact a lot with the world and still stay happy. More power to them, and I envy them. In my unfortunate case, though, I have to guard vigilantly against the world and ensure that my dose of it does not exceed a safe limit. For better or for worse, this is the only way I can ensure my sanity. As Camus said, nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.