There are days when one has nothing to do. Despite the hungry search for something to occupy your attention, you see nothing that seems even remotely interested in making itself available to you. It is on such days that you mind starts flirting with certain dangerous questions that it had been carefully ignoring till then. One such question is "What has my life come to?"; the answer of which is usually the same as the question, just followed by an exclamation mark. Thus your day falls into an elaborate introspection of your recent past. The days are stranded out. Stripped bare of its abstract. Each event scrutinised. Each action charted up and presented statistically. Random graphs and pie-charts demonstrating your performance haunt your brain. The thoughts nag you into admission of the fact that you have failed to see your life to the royal ends that you had planned. You sulk into depression; looking at everything around you in disdain. You never wanted them. Holding the work given to you in contempt. You never wanted that too. Thinking of your current sweethearts. Not them either. So what exactly IS right with your life? Ponder as much as you may, you fail to realise within those few irritable hours that the fault lies way off the search space. The concept of planning is so for a reason. It is a plan. Not the real thing. You are living the real thing. THAT is right with your screwed up life.
I doubt there is anyone who is free from the plague of introspections. The seemingly happy people have their sad moments too. It is not the sadist in me that believes this. Rather, I feel that those moments of gloom render in us a new image of hope. We astonishingly get on with our lives, with a renewed hope in the same plans. That is as sad a thought as is the act inspiring. We fail to see that the plans will perhaps never be realised. We fail to see that we will compromise on certain key issues and justify it to ourselves in some way or the other. Reassuring ourselves that it is how things need to be in order to be happy. But would we rather not seek the happiness we once aimed at? And hold our heads high while we do so? Amazingly, right now, I am unable to choose which one is the way I would rather tread!
On one side is an acceptance of failure, a power to adapt and a way to be happy despite the circumstances. One the other is the will to fight through, the need for integrity and search the happiness you always wanted. For there are always two kinds of happiness: the ones that you want and the one that you get. And there is no degree of similarity between the two. Though much greater in magnitude, the one that you want is much evasive; possibly non-existent. While the happiness you get is immediate, though short lived and not as gratifying. These can be the only two possibilities here. You can either be happy in your current situation, forgetting your dreams of grandeur, suffering the humiliation in private, reminded of it only in the questions asked by long lost friends, but consciously forgetting it in the shadow of the complacency you feel. Or you can live a life of unhappiness with a bleak possibility of seeing happiness at the end of the road, suffering public humiliation at your lack of success but able to justify the failure to yourself as success.
I refuse to believe in the weaker hypothesis of living in peace with your present while striving for what you aimed. It requires two totally opposing sets of mental abilities that is impossible in an indivisual. Like all other situations, there is no middle way. The middle way is quite certainly no way at all. You have to choose or let the choice be made for you. But you will have to walk one of these paths for sure. So choose ye humans! Choose your happiness wisely.
