Growing up or out? ~ A personality check

There was a time in our lives when even the pettiest of issues in the recent times would have appeared mammothian and would have unlocked a dam of tears from a well spring so deep inside us that we knew not the fact, that we were young then, vulnerable to hurts, susceptible to believing hearsay and probably too innocent to comprehend that life is nothing but a cornucopia of pleasant and unpleasant instances. Yet, with each phase as we grew we grew shedding the image of the year gone by only to adapt to the new phase in life. But then, somehow there always is one category of people who fail to adapt to the changes that life has to offer and continue to live in a self created time loop, unwilling to come out of it knowing for a fact that there is nothing in the world that could beat that one enemy of theirs, the age and more so, the experience that tags along.

What is making me write about this all of a sudden? A couple of days back, one of my college friends and I were casually chatting when she inadvertently blurted out that she and one of our common close friend were not in talking terms any more. On more probing, I happened to know that the cause of such trifle was merely a very small thing after all. And that she had failed to attend the latter’s marriage for some genuine reason. Well, I was more amused than being surprised as I have had such experiences a tad too many. But what I did not get about all of this, is what was the mere point in breaking ties with a person you have been so close with for over a decade over such a trivial matter? And that is where I would say, maturity does not come with age but it rather comes with experience. For all, it made me think, ‘Why do people have to behave in an insolent manner in the most fragile moments?’ (considering every human is an insolent monkey at some time or the other in life), ‘Why do we get hurt by some dear one leaving aside the fact whether the hurt caused was intentional or not?’, ‘Why do we often succumb to that inescapable impulse to answer back when we know that the person does not have the intellect to understand anything that we may have to say?’ and such questions keep prodding in more and more! And here, I remember having read a statement in my school days,’Work expands to occupy time’. If I could draw an analogy to this statement, it would be something like, ‘Unquestioned sensitivity expands to occupy sanity’. And then sanity is lost at some time. Just like my friend was quite upset knowing not whatever happened that the other friend just snapped ties with her, and all for something so trivial.

I myself have experienced many instances as these. Rude and insensitive questions have always popped up at the most inconvenient times, such as,’You don’t seem to socialise much post marriage’, ‘You don’t return my calls at all!’, ‘You seem to have forgotten friends for good’ and so on and so forth. Of course, not that every clown in the town deserves an answer, but just that I had never sworn some oath to explain to every other person to answer questions that are uncalled for. Some questions have been pretty hurtful too which have eventually led to broken friendships. And such moments often help you understand that some things are just not meant to be.

But there is one thing more that one learns eventually with experience. When you get hurt by someone, it is not because that person wanted to hurt you, leaving the intention part alone, but because you just allowed yourself to get hurt. The space, the attention and the most precious of all, the time you give a person determines how susceptible you will be to getting hurt by his/her shortcomings, despite the fact that your own shortcomings may get overshadowed by your overbearing eyes that refuse to look inside of you. A fact of life that each one of us has to live with is knowing that somewhere down the line, our opinions will change, our priorities will change and our personalities too will undergo a lot of transformation. The goodness and the well being of body and soul lies in the realization, that no matter what changes, the positive attitude towards life, the acceptance of life with its bittersweet moments and to accept one’s own shortcomings with all humbleness should remain the same.