The Hows and Whys of Life………

Am back, and this time after a year……

Whenever I have taken to writing to indite my thoughts and feelings, I have more often than not, chosen to go by a central theme. But today, for the first time, I am here to just let out an incoherent flow of emotions. It’s difficult to explain the reason behind the urge to do so, but I guess, so far as the ‘I’ in me is concerned, it’s somehow just the need of the hour.

I have read and heard abundantly about one thing – ‘Life is a lesson, it teaches you a lot’. While sometimes this message would come from my mother telling me that each experience in life would teach me how to deal with things better than I did the last time, at others, it would come from just some random piece of text that I happened to run my eyes through, or from some candid moments shared with a close confidant. The hardest and possibly the best way though, is to get the message from your own experience. Although I must also admit that it definitely isn’t the sweet and encouraging piece of practical wisdom that you always gain in the process. However, it does make you a stronger person, one who can face life’s challenges with an undaunted spirit. But, in my view, more than anything else, it just somehow gives you the strength to live through a lot of unfair, unexplained, unjust, harsh and hurtful situations in life, and trust me on this, life does have loads of them in store for each one of us.

Over the last few days, some of my personal experiences, as well as what I have heard from people in different contexts, have forced me to take a rather quizzical look at life.  Although, I am aware of the fact that most of these queries would never have a logical answer, but that is what bothers me the most. Well, if I come to think of it more closely, it is more to do with the people involved, when such difficult situations are created in life, than life in itself, but I still can’t keep myself from asking this question of ‘Why?’, to which there is obviously no answer. And it is this unanswered question that makes life an eternal search, and sometimes just a compromise to fill in the gaps.

Let’s take this for an example – you have made possibly the only and the most difficult choice in your life. Make it anything that suits your imagination, the choice of a career, a life partner or any other important decision that you have taken. Your conviction says it is the right decision, and so you give it your all. With years of dedication, loyalty, honesty and trust you work towards making it a success. You nurture your dream and sacrifice and give up on a lot of other things and patiently wait for your efforts to show the results that you hope for and in all honesty, deserve as well. But destiny plays the cruel game, and you see your dreams shattered right in front of your eyes.  The distressing part – you were in no way responsible for it. It happened because people or situations in life betrayed you, they took you for granted and disrespected your sacrifices and efforts. It is then that you see yourself asking – ‘Why?’.

I came across a person a few days back whose ability to hope for and give life another chance after the innumerable times life had pushed her back, simply amazed me. She had been wronged by the people she had given her all to, many a times, but each time she gave those very people yet another chance to prove her faith and belief in them right. I felt she was demeaning herself in doing so over and over again. But then I tried to look at things from her point of view. She had dedicated a decade of her life, given up on a lot of her dreams, sacrificed a lot, and sincerely given her all to this aspect of her life. It was her ‘ALL’. So, she probably didn’t want that to turn into nothing, and so she clung on to the last thread each time and worked towards making it a strong binding. It is then that I started to see sense in her madness.

But, then I peered at the other side of the picture. Was it giving the people involved in her life, the freedom to take her for granted, to believe that she could never walk away? Probably yes. Which is why they kept doing the same everytime. They would give her a few days of confidence that this would never happen again, with assurances and pleas of forgiveness. And then they would expect her to get back to normal, resume her duties and responsibilities with all honesty and dedication, failing which she would be questioned, in a manner that said that this is what she was meant to do. It appalled me..….and this brought me to yet another question – ‘How?’. How could life (or put it as people if you like it, because life in a lot of ways is made up of the people involved) be so unfair?

This probably isn’t a very uncommon thing in the life of a lot of people, especially women, to be more specific the married ones. It is not that I have a chauvinistic attitude, but even in this age where we proudly proclaim that we believe in gender equality, there is this strange bias that I have seen most married women go through. I have seen a few lucky ones too, who have found a second home post marriage which gives them the same care, love and respect that all women as daughters get in their parent’s house. Very often we see a lot being expected out of women…...get married and there you go with a long list of duties, responsibilities and expectations to be fulfilled. Never mind if the standards set for the terms of  ‘duties, responsibilities and expectations’ widely vary when it comes to the other half of the conjugal relationship. Things that are considered unacceptable, almost criminal when it is for the female in question, happily become synonymous to ‘OK’, or ‘Mistakes happen’ when it comes to the male. The ones who decide to raise a voice or walk out are conveniently termed as incompatible or incapable of handling marital duties. Going by natural senses of logic, we might very well ask – ‘Why this difference?’. Of course, there is no logical answer and we as women, have somehow come to terms with this unanswered question of life atleast.

So, on the note that I had started with, although arising from an array of incoherent thoughts and feelings, I do have a lot of questions for life…....the unanswered Hows and Whys of Life!!!