Warning: Use of derogatory terms in writing.
Fast moving world, this is how I picture it in my head. The busy streets of New York, hundreds of people walking past the Times Square with caffeine in one hand and their mobiles on other. Nobody knows where the person right next to them is headed to, they walk together in total sync for minutes and then turn to their own directions and part ways. Nobody has the time to pause, to reflect. Sometimes it is scary to realise that every passing second of your life is the first and the last time of its occurrence in this version of reality, in this lifetime. Waking up every day, there is always a routine of activities ahead of us that we do throughout the entire day. School, college, work, home anywhere we go the schedule holds us hostage.
At the end of the day there is very little time left for ourselves. So, every dawn a voice deep down inside of you encourages you to do better today than yesterday. This voice is unique for everyone. One day it says be kind to others, the next day it says be kind to yourself.
It’s bitter sweet that we don’t live alone in this world. There are people, many people around you. Some make it easier for your voice, while some seem very hard to understand. And it’s natural for us to judge them. If you’re lucky, you’re right a couple of times but you know-Maybe the girl with the “social butterfly” status, who is currently with her 6th boyfriend whom you call a ‘slut’ misses the one true love that happened to her, her first love. Maybe the boy who doesn’t know how to talk to girls and is always with his books needs an 85% to continue his studies with a scholarship to support his widowed sick mother. Maybe the girl who starves in the name of dieting for the so-called ‘boy attention’ has an eating disorder that doesn’t help her gain weight but saves herself pizza every weekend. Maybe the guy who doesn’t hang out with the “Stud-gang” is suffering from stage 3 lung cancer, so he rather stays home writing the novel he always wanted to finish. Maybe the boy who broke up with every girl he was ever with had a mother who left him for another man when he was just 4. You know, just maybe.
Our job isn’t to fix anyone around us. Every person you meet has a different perception of you, you are bad in someone’s stories and good in others. Somehow we equate our self worth to others perception of yourself and thrive to make it perfect without accepting the fact that it is going to change anyway.
Self-worth is not your list of achievements, in many dysfunctional families there are comparisons of the siblings involved, one might be smart while the other might be smart in a completely different sense. Pointing people out for their flaws isn’t going to help “change” them and we ought to realise this.
We often think we need to take ‘breaks’ or ‘pause’ or ‘unplug’ only if a very tight and serious schedule was a prerequisite. I mean it is not entirely our fault, we assume our self worth to be equivalent our productivity level and our list of achievements. So, I’m here to tell you. It might sound hideous to a regular person about why anyone would deserve a break if they didn’t work hard enough but a depressed person, takes their entire energy to wake up from his bed and is left with nothing for the whole day.
Mental breaks are essential. Necessary to reboot yourself, cleanse your system, do relearning of your patterns. A few ways to do this creating something from the learning. People resort to painting, drawing, craft making, writing and journaling, creating music, cooking, exercise and more. Always find something that makes you forget the world for a minute and do it with love every time you feel the need to do it.
Happy ME TIMEs to you!
