Life with disillusionment

It's been a long long couple of months. It's strange how you often have an image of how your life is going to be like and it crumbles into bits, isn't it? Or how you spend a considerable amount of time feeling extremely contented and happy in life and then, poof! It's as if someone has upended you, or the world around you, or both. Of course, it's very easy to feel happy and contented with life when it is going your way, as easy it is for everything to go haywire.

When I was younger, my mum's favourite adage was that whatever goes up comes down, that things always moved in a circle of favourable and unfavourable, that life is a great equaliser. Happiness will be followed by sadness and sadness will be followed by happiness. In this vortex of emotions is how we shall and do (and always have) exist. Of course, this is probably what everybody's mum probably said. I wonder why it was so much easier to believe it than it is now. 

We've read in novels of fanciful protagonists who had committed the folly of thinking that life is always going to be a walk down a rose garden. We've also read of protagonists who were so steeped in the romantic notions of tragedy that they would imagine every aspect of life to be one. And both are ridiculed as unrealistic notions of how life really is. But isn't life mostly about going from one to the other? When things are going your way, it is very easy to believe that things are always going to remain that way. And when things aren't going your way, it is again very easy to think that they never will. Both are ridiculous, you say? But then what is not? What would you say if one spent their happy days waiting for something to go wrong because that's how things work, right? If you're happy for too long, then something is going wrong. Similarly, what would you say when you feel a perverse monstrous sense of relief when things do go wrong because then at least, you are not waiting in anticipation of it happening? Depressive or realistic?

There are fewer things more difficult than being faced with one's mediocrity. How it feels to make one's peace with it is something I am not yet equipped to write about though. That's an accomplishment that still eludes me. All our lives, our parents, friends and well wishers assure us that we are special, that there is something about us that sets us apart from others, that we are meant to accomplish great things, that at the end of our lives we'll leave behind a legacy which at least a few people will have the occasion of remembering. And we let ourselves believe it. After all, who would want to live with acute consciousness of their mediocrity? Who would want to be continuously aware of the fact that their life is going to be the same as that of a billion other people, that their biggest accomplishment will be the fact that they managed to lead an unremarkable quiet life till they faded into oblivion, till the only people who remembered them were childhood friends who had at that point believed that they had been cut out for great things? Who would want to admit the fact that not everybody is meant to do great things and that the biggest service they could do to themselves and the world is to leave brilliance to brilliant people.

Low Expectations

No, this is not an ill fated attempt at a parody on Charles Dickens' classic "Great Expectations". It's just a phrase that has been twirling in my head in the past few days. Yes, twirling. I can practically see it dancing its way into the deepest recesses of my brain. I can't decide between keeping the tone of this post light bordering on ridiculous or just go all out with some cynicism and depress the hell out of ya folks. 

Let's start with what acted as the final impetus for this rant. I read yet another of those "Date a girl who does thingumajiggyblahblah" articles. Now, this is a trend that had started off considerably well. "Date a girl who reads", "Date a girl who writes", "Date a girl who travels" etc and very quickly descended in a downward spiral to "Date a girl who loves biryani", "Date a girl who shaves her legs" blah blah. You get the drift. Not only do all these articles weirdly fetishize one aspect of a person's character, they are more often than not patently ridiculous. She should dream all the time, she should live like every day is her last day, everything in life should be an adventure, she should be happy all the time, she should love puppies and babies and flowers, she should be your passport to adulthood by being a kind, nurturing, forgiving, source of endless support signifying everything that either doesn't exist or if it does casts extremely unforgiving standards on women. Grow up. Your girlfriend (or boyfriend, for there are counterparts to these articles fetishizing men) are going to be real life people with real life worries and anxieties and obligations and cannot possibly live up to the exacting standards that these articles harp on. I can't bring myself to believe that people actually consider this nonsense seriously but then there is no other explanation to the regularity with which such articles turn up in the internet.

Of course, if I were a scholar, I would argue that this trend ties in with a very well researched and oft perceived fault with my generation which brings me to the second part of my post. A lot has been written on the perpetual state of unhappiness that plagues us millennials (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/generation-y-unhappy_b_3930620.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in) for there is always something or the other that's wrong or doesn't meet our exacting standards. I can vouch for this personally, being one myself as as from my keen observation of my friends and acquaintances. If one thing is going our way, there are many others which just submit to our desires. For, you see, our desires are many. We have been taught since our early days here that we can have it all- Money (with a capital M), Friends, Family, Love, Leisure, Passion, Conviction, Career-and hold each of these dear to our hearts while compromising on nothing. We are special, you see, more educated, with more opportunities, longer life spans, more discerning tastes- we are the embodiment of perfection itself. So it's only natural when this glasshouse of impossible ambitions comes tumbling down when we actually try doing these things all at once and realise that, after all, we can't have it all. 

Low expectations. These two words spin a rather negative woeful tale, don't they? We are always taught to aim high, to expect lots for how are we to achieve great heights when confined within narrow circumferences. But what about knowing ones limits, learning how to be happy with our present state of being, not mourning the loss of possible future accomplishments while sitting on a veritable stockpile of past and present ones? Low expectations doesn't necessarily mean complacency, a lack of desire to succeed or for that matter a lack of ability to do so. Maybe it just is an acknowledgment of how one can't have it all at one point in time, of how if one desires to accomplish something in particular, than another thing, another desire must give way to it. Maybe, it is the key to a life where lack of constant achievement doesn't equal failure, where it is not all or none, where one knows how to be happy by just being. Maybe, just maybe.