When your phone needs to be rebooted every now and then,
What do you do ?
You read up some help online and they tell you to shut down your background processes and purge out all the unnecessary apps. You do it. But then again a few days later , it hangs and you are back to square one. You realize you have to free some memory and remove some of the apps which are really using a lot of your battery. You don’t want to remove them. But you say to yourself , its all for the greater good , and you do it anyway.
It works well for a great few months and then again it fizzles out and you end up at where you were a few months back. You wonder why a perfectly nice looking phone which looks pristine from the outside got so messed up inside .
You sigh.
You realize that there is only two other alternatives now, you hard reset or get a new one.
Sadly we humans are not as replaceable as mobile phones. But our minds are highly similar. We deal with our psyche in much similar a way as we deal with our malfunctioning devices. We have memories we like to hold onto and store even though they just consume a lot of space in our mind. We all have those apps we will never use which cause endless disruptions in our life but we never remove them like we don’t get rid of the toxic people in our life.
Nobody really wants to hard reset and lose it all. Everybody wants a temporary solution because the familiar feels good. It feels right. This goes on till we finally realize that life can no longer go on this way and we have to do a hard reset.
Being a third year undergraduate is tough. It’s not like being 22 was not hard enough. We all have our heartbreaks, hormones and emotions to deal with , now we also have failures. Endless failures. Every where you see around you , are students getting accepted into Grad Schools of their choice (and your choice) , there are people getting placed in companies which are tier 1 and people going abroad for internships. At every instant you wonder, are you doing it right ? Are you going in the path meant for you ?
Sometimes the thought of all the people doing much better than you veers you off the track. You imagine that what you are doing is not suited for you. You feel like focusing on other aspects of your life hoping that it will bring you more fulfillment. You start wondering why you don’t have a special someone yet ? Why does that guy not like you ? How come you are not tall enough, fit enough ? The blows you rain upon yourself never end.
Peer Pressure seemed like a fancy word to me when I was young. I used to imagine it was something about how other people coerce you into doing certain things you shouldn’t. The irony is the biggest pressure you can get is from yourself. Nobody really judges you for what you have done and the maximum judgement you can get is from yourself. It so happens that every person who wants to do well has a bar of expectation that they keep for themselves. Every day they look at the bar and measure how much they need to jump to touch it. This bar is good when all you see is yourself and your bar, but then if you look next to you and see the guy also trying to jump, you feel his bar is higher and so you raise your bar. The more people you look at, your bar just goes higher and soon you cant even want to jump. You let it go and lie down depressed.
What do we do when we are so bruised from all the blows we have rained on ourselves ? Finally we feel like we are the most useless worthless people to have lived on the earth. That’s when you realize that enough is enough. Its okay to have this many restarts and failures in life. If we can persistently switch on and off the mobile phone despite it having so many problems, Can we not try a little harder on the poor machine that is ourselves ?
I believe the best way to move ahead is to cut off. Sit down quietly and realize that the only person who can heal yourself is you. Nobody is ever going to feel what you feel and help you the way you can. So its better to get up and draw the curtain between you and the people around, you cannot stop comparing with. Its better if you introspect and realize that obtaining all those other things is not what you wanted in the first place. It is better if you cut off some parts of your life which were making it hard for you to move ahead.
Fresh starts. Thanks to the calendar, they happen every year. Just set your watch to January. Our reward for surviving the holiday season, is a new year. Bringing on the great tradition of New Year’s resolutions. Put your past behind you, and start over. It’s hard to resist the chance at a new beginning. A chance to put the problems of last year to bed.
Who gets to determine when the old ends, and the new begins? It’s not a day on a calendar, not a birthday, not a new year. It’s an event. Big or small. Something that changes us. Ideally, it gives us hope.
A new way of living and looking at the world. Letting go of old habits, old memories. What’s important is that we never stop believing we can have a new beginning.
But it’s also important to remember that amid all the crap are a few things really worth holding on to, and one of those things is that bright spirit we call ourselves.
The Politically Wrong Bong 