By Z.A
Usually, you don’t get to choose much in your initial life, where you are born, which circumstances you will be raised in, or what environment you will be exposed to.
The Five W,s (Where, When, Who, Why, and What) are facts, and as per my understanding “Every Fact has an Effect”, like if there is rain (Fact) outside you will get wet (Effect). You were born into a rich family; hence, you will miss out on most of life’s hardships.
If circumstances present you with great educational opportunities, you will be an asset to any company. If the environment is positive, you evolve to be a happy person. But naturally, you get to be groomed by your lovely parents who were exposed to a certain genus of circumstances, wherein, they developed a certain criterion or mindset through which they intend grooming you to face this world and everything related to it, wherein, you predominantly develop your lens through which you see life and everyone who tags along in it. Well, being realistic, these are what I call “Uncontrollable Facts” that you cannot choose to change, they just happen. Although we don’t get to decide much initially for what we were exposed to, though we can now determine what we become and establish ourselves to be what we want to be.
Not Designed but Programmed
Once you are born into a family, where you are blessed with an immense amount of love, attention, and affection you become “The Daddy’s Boy”, you love being appreciated for whatever you do in return. You start loving the phrase “That’s My Boy”. Every night you go to sleep, you start replaying the admiration you got throughout the day from your parents for every right thing you did, as a result, you feel content, happy, and proud. These feelings work on you like a drug, and you get addicted to it sooner or later. You start to fantasize about yourself as the apple of your family’s eye. And then the grand statement; “My Son Never Said No to His Dad”. You love it, you need to hear it more, and you cannot live without hearing it again and again.” You are the mature one out of your siblings”, hence, you become the responsible son your parents ever dreamt of. You try to take on responsibilities that are above your age, but in the process, you don’t realize that you are leaving behind a version of yourself that was supposed to exist then. So, all for what, “To Feel Content”.
Life passes like a rollercoaster with its difficulties, and you become a version of someone that “Most People Would Love to Keep but Very Less Would Love to Respect”.
It starts from” That is my boy” and move forward as that is my student, that is my friend and that’s my husband. Some call it people pleasers, others call it empaths, but I would like to call you “The Ones Who Always Serve.” Your life purpose remains the same, but it just changes its shapes and forms.
Sailing in the tides of your romanticism, you forget to ask one important question to yourself such as, does she need this, is she expecting this, do you know who you are loving, do you even know her? Well, you know who you are loving
But here I must mention, that with the passage of time you have left yourself far behind and evolved into a person you never wanted. You might be out of the very few lucky ones who got their Better Halves who admire, respect, and appreciate you for being in their life, but most chances are you landed with your Other Halves who feel entitled to have you in their lives and that’s it. Maybe, you landed in to into a tunnel where you see light at the end but sometimes you land into Mariana Trench, where the deeper you go, the more you put in, and the more you strive; the darker, the deeper and lonelier it gets.
The Urge to Fill Voids Inside You
Keeping above all in view, unintentionally certain voids are being created inside you. These voids don’t come to the surface until and unless you get exposed to different situations in life, wherein you start to see yourself and view an image of missing pieces. But no problem, you are an adult now, and certainly at a marriageable age, living in a culture where elders decide the right ones for you with all their sincere feelings and emotions. And there you go; you have a person to get married to. Finally, you see her, you don’t only see a person, but the receiver of all your love, emotions, romance, and most of all the person who will fill all those voids and gaps being created inside you, like a jar filled with pebbles and she is like sand to sneak inside and fill every gap. You thought you had faith in that person, but I doubt, you became Codependent. It was abidance, inhibition, or modesty rather than subordination. So, the time has come when the tables turn, the moment when you give it all, and the moment when you let all your walls down. The moment after which you will never be able to love someone else in your life, all your decisions, emotions, and happiness will revolve around this person, the center of your gravity, the contentment.
So, it all begins, when the other person gets overwhelmed by your love and your never-ending affection. But sailing in the tides of your romanticism, you forget to ask one important question to yourself such as, does she need this, is she expecting this, do you know who you are loving, do you even know her? Well, you know who you are loving. You are loving your wife, the first and the last lady of your life, in a culture where it is normal to let go of all your boundaries and embrace the spouse with all your heart.
You know, the harsh reality is that you are wrong, and you were, you wore those rose-colored glasses and saw the lady through them, you saw her flaws, her awkwardness, her feeling of suffocation, her quietness, her distant and avoidant nature, but it is all fine, isn’t it? After all, she is the one and the only, but my dear friends on this roller-coaster ride did you realize that “You Didn’t Love Her, You Loved the Person That She Could Be Or Could Have Been”, or the love she could have offered, or maybe the goodness she could have brought in your life.
You hallucinated it all, you didn’t process your irrational thoughts, the reality is that you got carried away in the exuberance of your romantic fascinations. And you realize that, the woman who once became your pride, the smile on your face once you thought about her, your motivation for being a better and wealthier man to provide her with more and more was nothing more than “Just A Figment Of Your Imaginations”.
The Facts
I can be the guy to sugarcoat and tell you that she was wrong, and you were right, but it doesn’t work this way. The reality is that you just got carried away with all your unrealistic perceptions. Being from any Culture or Religion, we are not supposed to be codependent, we depend on God and God only, yes, we love humans, but the reality is that 99 percent of us, love our glorified version of a partner or an unrealistic picture of a person. Truth is that it is not a what’s based on facts, it’s based on our rigid way of thinking being developed for the person in front. When the fog is gone and a clear picture comes to light, we face the deepest and darkest of our sorrows and with disappointment.
In our society our sincere friends and elders always guide us “To Take Things Slowly”, though we don’t like to hear that in our glorified lover state, but the reality is that we actually should, just like matters on earth that stay for hundreds of years underground, but finally evolve with time into valuable fossils, hence, the fact is that “It Takes Time”. So, if you are mature, you will realize that you should take it slow, whether it’s your emotions, maybe expectations, or being vulnerable, timing is everything. Because giving things time will provide you with opportunities to reanalyze, wherein, you select the correct course of action in that situation, hence, less feeling of regret.
It is very pertinent to mention here that our world, economies, systems, and emotions are driven by certain cultures being subconsciously engraved in our brains. We sometimes get confused as a man about the things we were supposed to do naturally after getting married, like throwing our clothes on the bed, leaving the toilet floor wet, or being nonresponsive to small compassionate expressions of our wives, such things in the modern age are being done by masculine women. Here is where the cultures differ, women are the biggest and the most natural resource of nurturing in this world, they tame men, groom kids, shape our environment, and most of all convert our house into a home. As the equilibrium gets disturbed, everything falls apart, wherein, men once fell in love with a woman felt weak and vulnerable, acting like a child in front of their wives. But due to a major paradigm shift in the overall behavior of modern women, men have stopped acting like a child, that excitement, spark, and romanticism are all gone, and what’s left behind is just man.
To all the ladies in the world, I would say “If Your Man No Longer Acts Like a Child Around You And He Is All Quite And Mature Now, Than Congratulations, You Have Lost Your Man”. Because there is a huge difference between a man and a woman when they fall in love, a man becomes weak and vulnerable, like a little boy in her arms, while a woman becomes strong, as she knows there is a guy who will always stand by her side, no matter what.
Unfortunately, people don’t change, they just make conscious decisions about their happiness for the people they love, but they remain the same. They give you priority, they find time, and most of all they listen to you or see your actions to understand your sincere intentions. Usually, we see what’s being shown upfront, but when we love someone, we genuinely try to discover the wholehearted intent behind it. We never stop loving; we just hate the fact that we loved the wrong person instead. As the wrong love always comes in your life at the right time but the right love always comes at the wrong time in your life. And when you needed it the most, you never got it and later you are love-bombed once you no longer require it. Because at that time you are way too tired of all this drama because you are not afraid of loving again but getting hurt by loving again.
There is no regret in giving it all to the next person, it’s never your fault, your fault is when you start expecting them to show gratitude in return. On the other hand, it is realizing that their response cannot be defined by ours as we cannot force someone to reciprocate the same. You may succeed in making them act in a certain way, but at the same time, you fail to make them feel in a certain way. As you cannot change someone who doesn’t see a question with their action, you can only change how you react to them. During my tenure in my job life, I was told that the most rational way to get rid of the problem is to solve the problem, not to linger on with it. But the best advice I would give to you is that no all problems have a solution, sometimes you just move on, leave that version of you that had issues with that problem, and move ahead.
As God said, “I May Change Everything in This Universe for Which You Shall Pray or Ask For, But Will Not Change The Way The Others Perceive, Think Or Feel For You”.
It’s Not the Motivation but The Discipline
I also learned in my professional life through different exposures that motivation gives you the courage to take your first step, in fact, the second step is the hardest to take. To keep going you need discipline, which we actually misunderstand, it is the purest form of self-love, it is your small rational sacrifices you make to provide better circumstances and a future for yourself. It is like building an arsenal of tools you would require to carve and shape your future problems and opportunities. Discipline is taking a pause every time you decide and analyze it for not only the present but the future. The words you speak, the paths you take, and the major decisions of life you make if given a second thought, the picture would be altogether different.
The most difficult form of discipline to impose is the discipline of wants, needs, expressions, and most of all actions. Because time stops for no one, life cares for no one, and everything moves on, even your body doesn’t, it gets old every passing moment.
Don’t Stop Dreaming
We cannot change things, the way they are happening, and their outcomes. You are hopeless from certain people, and very unfortunate if those were the people who were your light, your happiness, and certainly your center of everything. And now you realize that you don’t have much to do. Well, here I would like you to move out and see people lying on the streets, see the birds returning to their nests with empty beaks, or the nomads in deserts waiting for rain. Or maybe, the smallest thing like an itch on your body which you can attend to, but there are millions in this world who are physically paralyzed, they can’t even do that. The dilemma of the world is that we fancy exotic cars, others fancy just a car, majority fancy money to utilize public transport, but sometimes to economize we go by foot thinking how blessed all above mentioned are. But we forget that while walking we cross many who are in wheelchairs who fancy us, or at the other end of the road a Billionaire across the window in a hospital lying on the bed looking at the guy in a wheelchair and fantasizing that one day he will be taken out on wheelchair to have some fresh air.
Well, do we realize how ungrateful we are, how thankless and unrealistically hopeless we have become? We have been blessed in so many ways that we don’t even realize. For that we need to look around, my elders always said that whenever you are happy look at people below your status, it will inculcate humbleness inside you, but when you are sad you still look at people below your status, it will inculcate gratitude and contentment inside you.
So being fixated on changing someone, which further fixes your life, you better fix yourself. All you need is God, love him, and believe in him, if your prayers are listened to, they were rightly conceived, but if not then accept that it was not good for you and that maybe God wanted something better for you which you don’t realize now, but somehow at some point in time you will. The best example is those moments in your life where you look back and realize that you worked so hard on that project but still others were rewarded instead which led you to leave that company, and now you are in a much better place. Bad things in life that may have happened must be considered as catalysts to your better future and success.
Move around meet people, don’t stop, find a purpose. Like I met a psychologist who made me realize that she is not a doctor only, she is a human being. Being human is very rare nowadays, being human is valuable, sometimes all you need is not a wife or a friend or a doctor to consult but a human to talk to. Who would just listen and understand you? Make you realize that you have come this far, and you should be proud of yourself. Forget about taking revenge, as I learned that people don’t get that steel-nerved urge to fight, nor by any religion even but for the drive of revenge, and you never stop. Wherein, even all the great leaders in history knew how to start a war but did not understand how to stop it.
In the end, you should realize that the life that you think is a curse on you is the same life many on the streets dream of. We are all equal to God, he has given us all equally, some with money, others with respect, others with happiness of family, and some with nothing but contentment. So, live your life each day because every day you pass will never come back again.
