A friend of mine is lost… He is almost dulled out… In his mid thirties, he is going through the motions of his life – married and settled with 1 kid and a decent paying job, a home of his own and parents who were not dependant on him for anything… His wife is a pleasant person whom everyone loves and he himself feels happy & lucky to have her in his life…
But somehow he isn’t happy… He cannot place a finger on what it is… But he just doesn’t have any real drive to achieve anything… Life is on auto pilot… The duties he is fulfilling are getting done either because of the moral code his parents had imbibed in him about societal and family values or because of the adequate financial income he brings in by pursuing the strict norms his father had set for him to learn to earn from his young age…
He is hence left with nothing that he is really himself passionate about… No doubt he has a comfortable, pleasent life wherein he enjoys many gleeful and merry moments with his family and colleagues..
But still somehow he feels lost… He has shaped his life based on expectations of others and now when he is mostly independent and is achieving most of what his society had expected of him, he is finding himself listless with no new goals…
His wife is very supportive… She keeps urging him to finish his PhD in classical music – something on which he had religiously put in a lot of effort before marriage but couldn’t finish because of everything else including marriage… His in-laws or his parents wouldn’t accept him pursuing things which they believe clashed with their expectations of a son / son-in-law, husband or a father… So he had dropped it…
And now he feels what’s the point of finishing it… The feel, the passion or the ambition is lost… What for then?
I spoke with him for quite a long time… I reminded him of what vivacious people we were in our youth… full of energy, hopes and dreams… Probably it’s only a matter of finding ourselves again…
He said, that’s all fine and in his words – “but you are talking about a person of the past that doesn’t exist anymore… It’s only in your memories… and you need to know that people move on… What you call as finding myself again is more essentially reinventing my current self totally… And to do that there needs to be a fire within one self that can throw caution to the winds to pursue a dream that feels like one’s calling”…
He knew clearly what I was talking about… And to him, to make an effort more than what his duties and the expectations of his society are from him… or to even risk it even a little bit was not worth it – especially after having achieved so much on it… He was passionless, undriven, bored, lazy and what not… He used his accepted social expectations as the end of his life, reason of his mindset and the unchangeable reality of his being…
What a freaking excuse…
I was angry and crestbroken… One chooses what they want to use to define themselves, their situation, their reality… He had chosen to define himself as a self sacrificing ideal husband, son and father who had pursued no other goals but the expectations of his families… Even if it meant living an unfulfilled life…
And no matter how much I would tell him that it’s very much possible to believe in himself as a go-getter who has achieved a tremendous lot in his life and was now going to try and balance everything as much as he could including following various personal aspirations – and there is nothing wrong with it… He wouldn’t accept it… It was just too hard for him to ignite those ambers in his mind that had been extinguished by the burden of the self limiting definitions he had boxed and pulverised himself into…
The mid life crisis saga is nothing else but this… Where life becomes aimless and the ability to inspire oneself for new passions is lost (or where one is trapped in the past that has really already gone – a contradiction for another blog)…
When we are kids and young adults, our goals are defined by family and our society… We hear same things so many times about our selves… And then by the time we are adults and have the power to decide and have almost fulfilled all those duties… We are then left with no new yearnings or the fervour to make a fresh start at something exciting… On one hand we are bored and on the other we are too complacent and passionless to attempt anything different…
I am a big believer in pleasures of insanityand how pursuit of one’s personal yearnings is so blissful… So my ideas to him would have surely sounded risky, idealistic and impractical… But I have seen it with Jainee… She has been almost insane about her beliefs in image consulting and her zeal about its topics have enabled her to so beautifully manage our home, our kids and everything else whilst doing all she does on that front as well… She chose to define herself as someone who will balance everything and not sacrifice completely either her duties or her desires… She did not let the stereotypical social expectations of a self sacrificing mother define her life…
The constraints, the terms, the beliefs, the philosophy… Whatever we choose to define ourselves with – that’s who we become…
Aarav, my son has been told so many times that he is tall and thin, that now he has accepted that description and he tells that about himself to everyone when he has to talk about himself… And he makes no effort to change himself i.e. gain weight… Because to him, that is what he is now…
People need to make choices… Its not that everything is possible and by telling oneself that she can fly, the person can jump from a terrace and fly like an eagle… This is not about self affirmations… Nor is it about bringing balance to all aspects in our life…
It’s about us mentally accepting our selves as something or our situation as something that then ultimately leaves us complacent beyond recourse to any other alternative… That kills our ability to dream anything new… That makes us almost a nihilist to everything…
It’s about choosing our definition… Conciously…
I know that I am an extrovert… But when I chose to make that as my excuse to speak without thinking… Vulgarizing the freedom of speech in its pretext… And not attempting to even learn basic social decency… I am using it to define myself wrongly… Any characteristic, any situation, any history… Used to reason things which stop us from evolving into happy beings is wrong…
We can choose what we want to define ourselves as… And we should choose the ones which makes us happy… Whatever it is…
Inside VG... 
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