Friday, December 11, 2009

Live and let live ...

It's been a rather long night talking to a friend, who is going through a break-up and I found myself expounding my own theories on how to move on.

Everyone knows that break-ups are painful. The ego is hurt. The pride has to be swallowed. There are and will always be unanswered questions. There is trauma. Dreams evaporate before your very eyes. There is anger. There is depression. There is a feeling of being inadequate. There is a feeling of being totally useless. There are immediate regrets and what ifs. What if I had tried this, tried that? Would things be different? There are fleeting thoughts of what is the purpose of life and what's next. There are vague hazy visions of the future. There will be philosophical questions about yourself, about the existence of God, about whether justice exists in the world today. Well, let's just say it is and it would be a total mess that's simply not possible to explain without experiencing for oneself.

There are multiple ways to deal with it and while it's simply not possible to be so cold blooded-ly analytical and logical (as below) at a time when emotions and tempers will run high, it's not impossible as well.

There is the well familiar way of venting out your frustrations, of trying to reverse the tables of inadequacy, hurt ego back on to the other person. This is probably best captured in numerous movies. The most recent one that comes to my mind is 'Jab we met'.
The problem with this approach is it gives rise to anger and you simply can't say when you are in control and when your own anger is going to consume you. How would one know how much of retaliation is enough? How would you know when to stop, when you are undergoing all the feelings that I had explained earlier in this post? You read so many stories of how things went bad and then turned so violent. A more fundamental problem that I have with this approach is that you start to ridicule your own feelings. Let's say you loved someone deeply. Let's say things didn't work out. So would your love or what you felt be simply changed to hatred just because it didn't work out? Just because the other person left you away? That's so convenient. Is your love so conditional that it can exist only if the other person reciprocated? So fragile? What then is the meaning of unconditional love? Isn't all of love supposed to be unconditional? What then is love itself, if not unconditional? Why bother with these feelings if it's anything else? Does it matter?

Ok. So if love is unconditional, how do i ever move on? Well, that's precisely what brings us to another approach, seldom practiced out in the real world.
First is to realize that relationships seldom break-up cause of one person alone. On the face of it, it might seem that one person is totally at fault and the other totally perfect, but when you strip the facade and look deeper, there will be some size-able fault with both the people involved.
Secondly the person undergoing the painful break-up simply wishes the other person well, and walks away upholding his/her dignity. Find constructive ways in which you can channel your energies to create something of beauty, something of joy.
Write a novel...
Learn music...
Sketch something...
Learn a new hobby...
Tinker around with an automobile...
Go on a long tour...
Direct a movie...
Work like mad!...
Call up and surround yourself with friends, people whose company you enjoy...
Do home interiors...
Participate in contests and competitions...
Try to win a few...
Do some sudoku...
Try cooking new cuisines...
Run a marathon...
Get into a fitness regime...
or just try something different!

Slowly you would re-build yourself, re-invent yourself, feeling good about yourself and the day you are able to do that and be able to think of your past with a smile, know that you are ready all over again to share your life with someone else. This, arguably is significantly harder, for it involves not having to betray your own feelings of what you had felt once, but still being able to simply accept the past and move on...

Moving on is just a state of acceptance of things as they are and you don't necessarily need hate to do that...

Live and let live...