Tag: life lessons

ramblings, Words

Pretense

by WajihaLeave a Comment on Pretense

That one word to end the meanings of all words; words that do not stand a chance in front of the façade this one word entails. Every truth, all ingenuity, all graciousness is useless when faced with the intricate web of all the shiny mendacities this word so effortlessly weaves.

Such is the cruelty of this one word. Such is the power of it upon the lives of people all around us. Such is its significance for us. Ingenuity is a lost attribute now— or as far as I can perceive (and my perception is just that; perception). It is gone, buried and done away with. No one wants anything to do with it anymore. Why bother listening to the heart when I can follow the herd. Why bother being who I am when I can be someone else. Why be myself when I can be a third rate replica of someone more prosperous/beautiful/thinner/popular out there.

This world has traditionally been easier on the normal (read: ordinary) than the different. Because being different is often tantamount to being a failure; and failure is looked down upon. Failure is a thing to be avoided at all costs. It tends to have the worst of all meanings and it doesn’t matter if you think contrarily. Your opinion simply doesn’t matter. Period. Failures shouldn’t have opinions, because how can they? If the world doesn’t recognize me, how sacrilegious it is of me to acknowledge myself! How dare I think more of myself than what ‘they’ think of me!

I find myself surrounded by pretense. Those who effortlessly adapt to this philosophy, find that they’re better off in this world. Though whether or not it’s happiness that they experience or merely the satisfaction of conformity, I can’t say.

Eventually I will succumb to the pressures of conformity as well.
It is inevitable.
The pressures are too forceful. It is very persuasive. It has survived for centuries.
Or maybe I won’t and hence will just get old… very cranky and very unhappy.
It is all just a matter of time.
But time has never really been on my side.
And I walk alone.

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Words

Life

by WajihaLeave a Comment on Life

Love. Hope. Dream. All alive. All scattered. All significant enough not to be significant. You tend to start thinking about it only to realise there was never any promise for anything great. This was going to be torture. Slow and painful. Only to be ridiculed by death in your face for taking it all so seriously, for daring to dream. All of this and you hadn’t even signed up for it, in the first place. 

They tell me human existence is worth it.

However I do wonder if this statement has got any truth in it. Or perhaps it was said only to further ridicule our very existence? Perhaps. But we’ll never know, will we?

Words

Hope

by Wajiha2 Comments on Hope

Hope

For all those days I could not get out of bed.
For all those nights my mind found itself shattered into a million pieces,
For all those countless hours packed with increasing pessimism,
For all those times I just couldn’t get up and revive my journey,
I notice one that alters this pointless game for me, if only for a moment, an hour, or a day.
On that one day nothing goes wrong, no obstacle seems great enough to matter, no mountain high enough.

You can dismiss me by thinking these lines to be clichéd or without any concrete meaning at all. But do we need everything to have concrete existence or can, at times, a completely abstract idea matter as well? I trust that minus hope we, the all exalted human race, wouldn’t have persisted this long. And since we are one hell of a twisted race, there has to be something profound that keeps us thriving. That one ray of maybe-it-will-happen, no matter how dubious, that makes us endure the toughest of all days. Hope is a very strong word— which is why it has never been included in my list of all time favorites. Oh but more so for people who take it too seriously. For them hope gone-wrong can evoke all sorts of unwarranted emotions in them. Since sometimes hope conveniently becomes the unpredictable existence that it is and brutally refuses to honor our trust in it….

I write something and then struggle to give it a proper ending. It happens every time I open my machine with the soul purpose of giving life to the ideas bursting in my mind. I end up feeling like a disappointment every time I am concluding whatever it is that I have attempted to write. But I have still not lost the passion; that drive to write. I still want to work on myself, improve myself, till the very last day of my stay on this planet.

My hope in myself, though gradually declining, is what helps me get up every morning.

It’s what helped me write a post again.

Words

Path

by WajihaLeave a Comment on Path

I read an article today in the morning. Crux of it was that there is a “predetermined” path for everyone and all we have to accomplish in life is to follow the thing. Either it dawns upon us one fine morning or we have to take up a quest to find it. Now, I do not think, and never have that it is as simple as the author would like us to believe. First of all, he wrote this whole finding-your-path thing assuming there are no other factors involved. We cannot as a society function alone, and there are many other dynamics that influence our lives outside of our own selves. Sometimes, we just don’t know what we want from our lives. Other times, we unfortunately find our destiny (if we want to call it that) too late down the road. What do we do if we have already built a life by the time we supposedly find “our calling”? Do we just leave everything and set out on a soulful journey just because our “inner” being called out to us? Do we just abandon our family just because we think our “dream” is more important than they ever were and they were probably just something we were keeping ourselves busy with in the time being? Why do these so-called self-help authors make everything sound as easy as eating an apple?

Let me tell you what I feel about this issue, we all have a dream while we’re growing up. When a child is little, he/she sees the future in a way we, as grown ups, have forgotten to see. As we grow up, some of these dreams realise, whereas some don’t but depending upon their significance to us, the unfulfilled ones go into hiding in some deep dark corner of our heart. We don’t ever forget how we felt whenever we daydreamt about that specific thing no matter how far along we are in life. However, many a time that dream has got more to do with our childhood than reality, as unfortunate as it may seem. More often than not, we weren’t meant to do what we always wanted to do and we were meant to be exactly wherever we find ourselves in our life. Many a time, we keep pushing our present away for some mythical future, so much so that we don’t realize that we’re actually ruining whatever we have right now. So basically this whole finding your path mantra is just as good as bull shit to me. You’re either living it or you’re not.

Now I am not one for such ‘motivational’ lectures, trust me on that. Whatever I write here comes straight from my heart and since I am not a renowned person, I can afford to be as obnoxious as I want to and get away with it as well. Hah! Although I can’t say much about the renowned ones as well, but let’s leave this discussion for some other day.

But jokes apart, these soulful writers shouldn’t really do this to people. More often than not people will find themselves in situations that will forbid them to just leave and set off on a journey to some far off land. I am thinking of taking up a Masters course and I have been thinking about it since I don’t even remember when. Why? Mainly because I am an Accountant and even if my major interest in life has always been English Literature, it will make me feel a bit strange to just bid adieu to Accountancy as blatantly as that. All I want to do is to follow my passion but it is just not as easy as it may sound on paper since there are constraints involved both physical and mental. Now, I am not stating here that I will not go ahead and do it. For all you know, I might just find enough courage to begin next year! The fact that I am trying to state here is that we can just not leave everything one fine morning and decide that we want a different life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

So my friends, coming across the so-called path is not always pleasant. On the contrary, sometimes, stumbling upon your ‘path’ especially after you’ve come a long way in life might be frustrating — perhaps even worse than not finding it ever.

ramblings, Words

Unpredictable

by WajihaLeave a Comment on Unpredictable

Surprise is one of the most interesting things that I’ve come across in life. And to surprise someone in a way that is not expected of you is divine. It has a beauty that not many will understand. To leave people thinking about the (ulterior) motive behind your action, I think nothing is more satisfying than that. That dilemma is lovely. That curiosity is astonishing. That little doubt in someone’s mind about what you really mean by doing something they never expected is probably one of the strangest comforts you’ve been acquainted with. 

Life is a lot of things, but what is perhaps the most beautiful thing about it is its ability to be unpredictable about things that can be the most predictable.