Thought for the Day

Nothing kills a man more patiently and painfully than having to live with being someone, with a constant realisation that he could have been so much more.

Be it the valiant soldier smothered by guilt, who had fought with everything he had but still spends hours evaluating alternate MOs that could have saved his partner. Or the passionate sportsman kicking himself for the rest of his life, calculating where he could have squeezed in that extra millisecond in the deciding moments of that unfortunate final. The helpless man who struggles towards the end of every month, wondering how he can be a better parent, husband and provider. OR the hopeless romantic trying to make sense out of his first brush with infatuation, ruminating why he can be everything he must be, except the man that he wants to be with the girl.

It is difficult beyond reason, the feeling- an all consuming cocktail of regret, anger, despair and guilt- is too much for anyone to live with. There are moments of utter weakness, when you want to submit to the chaos. There are moments of undying despair, where each passing second is a striking reminder of who you are, and much more importantly- who you are not, who you can never be. There are moments of utter madness, where you are willing to trade every last bit of happiness that remain in this God forsaken life of yours for one more try. It pains even more to realize, eventually, how misplaced and irrational the attempts were in the first place.

It does not lie anywhere near your realms of control. Despite all your strength or wisdom, there is nothing you can do to “fix this”. It is like falling in a bottomless pit. It invades your deepest, darkest recesses, places you weren’t even aware existed inside you. It breaks your pride while relentlessly staring at you straight in the eye, proving conclusively beyond doubt that compared to this, wounds that heal themselves are like blessings of physical pain, for the most permanent of scars always lie within.

Sometimes life will spare you to wander amidst possibilities and search for that one tentative link somewhere among the terribly mangled chains of causality that could offer you some sign of hope for a change in circumstances. It is made worse by the following swathes of self loathing. The irony of it breaks you when you realize you have irrevocably been a part of something that can never be undone, in a universe that boasts of its eternal penchant for change.

The presence of that individual is a constant reminder of how you are forever doomed to be just a worthless fraction of what you could have been. There is little escape from this. Those who manage to do so emerge stronger, wiser men who have now lost faith in some (or many) institution(s) held dear to mankind. They are men who manage a silent laugh when people talk about destiny and how good things are always meant to be.

Pain has its own way of teaching you some of life’s most invaluable lessons. It poisons you day in and day out. It changes you in ways that cannot be undone. It makes you stronger, immunizes you for other far worse forms of suffering. You aren’t really better or worse, just someone you never were before, damaged in ways that will never be known to those even closest to you- veiled by smiles and laughs that will always hide much more than they will reveal.

Most of life is having to choose between holding on and letting go. Anything in between is dishonesty, hypocrisy and an ugly compromise. They say time changes everything. It is a lie. Time merely pushes things further into the past, rendering an illusion of change. Choices change things. They are not always nice but they are necessary and you must let go of something in order to move on to something else.

I have always believed that there are no things that are best left unsaid. But there are some that are best left written- words have a kind of indelible permanency which life so does not possess.