Our doubts are traitors

Our doubts are traitors - Shakespeare

How many times you have thought of doing something different, something out of ordinary and your fear has stopped you from doing it? Its too risky, its too fantastic or its ridiculous.  Familiar with the feeling? Our doubts are our traitors.

They stop us from putting trust in a relationship, they stop us from making a career change, they stop us from walking out from a bad relationship, and they stop us from following our dream.

So one should not listen to our inner feeling or don't pay heed to those doubts? Enter in to relationship and get betrayed? Leave our job and loose everything? Wait for the other person to change and be content with what we have?

There is a difference between doubt and an informed decision. If you see red flags right in the begin ing of a relationship, i.e., late coming, not returning calls or messages etc., do stop and think if it is a relationship worth getting into. Do your homework about your dream project before leaving your job. Do think of legal, emotional and financial aspects before you walk out of an abusive relationship. But that will be paying due diligence and not doubting. 

You can take up your hobby on a part time basis and you can have a frank talk about things that upset you in a relationship or you can make a solid base before you leave your job. But don't ever doubt if you can do it or not. If you can think of it, you can do it. Napoleon Hill said, ‘whatever the human mind can conceive, it can achieve'.

So smile, tell your doubts to go out and let hope, joy and confidence come in to take you to a journey of fulfillment.

So be it!!!

Life is a shuttle

I don't know what The Bard had in his mind when he wrote this but life, certainly, is a shuttle. Or not? A shuttle goes to and fro and keeps moving in a loop but life I think, is a journey which goes on and on. It does have its hiccups and stalls us sometime but even then life keeps passing.

Now whether the journey is pleasant or miserable is, to a large extent, in our hands. I hear the naysayers,'its fate, destiny, kismet' and so on. I agree it is not always possible to get the results we want even after we have put in our best effort and have focused on our goal. We do get disappointed with our failures. We get depressed, we fret and fume, take out our frustrations on our near and dear ones. We even think the universe is conspiring against us and the world is out to get us.

No, I am not going to say, don't feel this way or be positive. It is very natural to feel this way. Enjoy your share of misery. Wallow in self pity for  some time. Done? Do you feel any better? No? See the futility of all that anger and persecution complex? Its not going g to lead you anywhere but to the abysmal pit of impotent anger and self destruction.

So what to do? Just take a diary and write down the reasons you can think of your failures. It does not matter if the failure is in business or relationships. The causes are essentially the same. We either don't give proper attention to areas we need to or ignore the core issues. So write honestly and not with self righteousness. Where do you think you could have handled things differently? What strategy you could have applied to avoid this mishap?

If you are really honest, you will not only get your answers but an insight too of how to turn things around d. It recently happened with me. I went through  a period of frustration in a relationship. I fortitude, I was so full of self righteousness that I allowed it to cloud my judgement. But, I had the epiphany and I decided to a new strategy to handle things. No, in a relationship, you don't have to be harsh but you can be firm and polite while stating your position.

The prerequisite is intellectual honesty. Be absolutely realistic and don't let anger dictate your mind.

Go ahead and do it, you will feel the difference.

So be it !!!!

‘ Beautiful things don’t ask for attention’

Of course they don’t. They get it automatically. Why? Because they are so attractive that one cannot help noticing them. A rose doesn’t shout, ‘look at me, I am so pretty. We look it even when in a hurry and admire it.

A laughing brook, rising or setting sun, a valley of flowers, a rainbow don’t have to prove their beauty. It is there for everyone to see. Nature does not seek compliments because it is perfect. It does not feel threatened.

We, humans, on the other hand, become vain if we are good looking. We become boastful and try to seek attention all the time. It gives our ego a big boost that we are pretty. In our quest to impress others, we do things that normally we would not think of. We let insecurities take charge and dictate our decisions and actions.

Is it because we know that the beauty of anything does not last forever and try to compensate? Or is it because our ego takes a beating if we are ignored for a few moments?

Honestly, humans have way of spoiling every thing by over thinking and too much analysis. But we, while watching a breath-taking sunset, think of ten other things and lose the moment.

Why am I writing all this? Because as I am growing old, I realize that one has to stop and smell the roses.

So have you? Try.

So be it!!!

Not all those who wander are lost’ – JRR Tolkien

On the contrary, I think, only those who wander really find something. Well, imagine a life with no ups and down, no risk, no tragedies, and no exhilarations. What a dull life it would be. Imagine if one never rebelled, never left the path decoded by society, never expressed one’s own will and never questioned existing norms. How boring that person would be?

Oh, don’t think I am encouraging everyone to declare their independence from all norms and live a bohemian life. What I am suggesting is to open our minds and accept new challenges, expect new possibilities and to accept different perspectives.

One does not have to wander physically. It is our mind we have to send on a journey of exploring new horizons and adapting to them. Remember Captain Kirk’s,”Scotty beam us up’? If Gene Rodenbury had not let his mind wander with such imagination, we would not have thought of a cell phone.

Why just fiction? If men had not imagined things as they should be instead of as they were, world would not have progressed so much. If Newton had not thought about why the apple fell on the ground only, surely we would not have understood the gravitational force. The United States of America was discovered because someone wandered. Mount Everest was climbed because someone wandered. The supersonic planes of today were made possible because someone imagined.

But, we humans close our mind most of the time to new possibilities because we don’t want to take risk. We shun other people because they have may be different skin colour or different language. We choose the safe and lock ourselves into our cocoons of prejudices because they are our comfort zones. They protect us from taking a risk. But is that an existence?

For starters, why don’t you make a new friend today or at the very least, strike a conversation with a complete stranger? You will enjoy. Let your mind wander

So be it!!!

‘We accept the love we think we deserve’

A friend of mine recently had heartbreak. She was seeing someone and she thought this was ‘the one’. She was pretty excited like a teenager. She actually blushed talking about him. We were all very happy for her as she had an abusive marriage in the past and had just come out of it.

I, somehow, was a little sceptical to start with. It seemed too good to be true. The guy was sending her flowers, was texting her and was eager to meet her all the time. Not that these are red flags. The speed at which the relationship was going was a wee bit scary. I wished all the happiness for her but had this nagging thought if it was a relationship on rebound.

She came out of a bad marriage not very long ago and has shown immense strength to pick up her career and has made a success of it. She is a professional and is pretty good. But she keeps meeting these men and every time the guy is ‘the one’. It pains me to see her getting hurt again and again.

The advice I’d like to give to her is to wait. Give yourself time. Do not accept anybody just like that. Concentrate on building up your career. Tell yourself you deserve real love. A love that may be doesn’t make your heart flutter but which comes after a friendship, which shows care and nurturing, which makes you do your best.

If you don’t value yourself, you will accept a relationship that makes you vulnerable, which makes you compromise your core beliefs and which makes you insecure. That is NOT love. We are all imperfect. The beauty lies in accepting our faults, our weaknesses along with our strengths. That gives us real strength. That gives us the ability to discern a real love and a passing infatuation.

Ask the best for yourself and you will get it.

So be it!!!

‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing’

Oscar Wilde wrote this in The Picture of Dorian Grey. I wonder how these great writers can see things we cant even think of? Even if we think we cant express. They can express the obvious and what is not so obvious to us in the most natural manner.

Seriously, isn’t this true. The world, they say, has become a global village and today we have access to goods from far-flung corners of the world. We are aware consumers and we know what price to pay. We are bombarded with the price match and bargains on order to run the large-scale production economies.

We have more comforts and luxuries in the history of mankind, we have technology, which was unthinkable even a few years ago, and we have satellites to help us predict right from weather to how much crops we would grow.

But do we have friendships that last a lifetime? Do we have family that stands by us in our times of need? Haven’t we forgotten the value of people in our life? We have more friends on Facebook than real life. We wish all those strangers happy birthday but don’t pick up the phone to connect with a high school friends because he has not ‘Made it’.

We go out for dinners with our bosses because we want to be seen at the right place at the right time to get that promotion but we forget to play with our kids. We celebrate our anniversaries in an exotic resort so that put pictures on Instagram for the world but forget to sit and just talk with our significant ones. And then we wonder why did our marriage fail. Why our kids don’t listen to us?

We remove the embroidered horse that our mother made from our wall because it doesn’t go with our décor. We bring a painting by a famous artist so people can envy our living room but we don’t have time to call our mother.

Knowing the value of things is something we have forgotten or at least have put on the back burner in our race to be better than the others. It is the value that we put on things and relationships that become our strength during our low. The friends who stand by you because you have nurtured the friendship, your family because you have been involved, your colleagues because you have helped them.

I would go the extent of saying that if you don’t value yourself, you will not value others.

So do you value yourself? Then value the people and relationship.

So be it!!!