Broke to Bliss
Personal growth coaches would tell you to stay away from anybody who is quenching one’s energy. While on the other hand, a faqeer (Darwesh) would tell you to give away all that you have for others. They are two completely different horizons of living one’s life. I am a nobody to draw a comparison of both, but the least I can do is share my experience of living both the philosophies in different phases of life.
For the most part, I have lived an ignorant life where I didn’t even know the difference between the above and how they will impact me and my surrounding world. And I feel the more I grow old, the more I realize that I know nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The point is not to figure out which approach is right, but it is more about being conscious of all that we do and the reason why we make certain decisions. It is now that when I look back, I can see that I used to make people around me happy while neglecting myself. The worst part was that I wasn’t aware of this. Interestingly enough, this was also the best part of living that phenomenon. It comes easy when you just don’t know the ins and outs of something, but you do it because that's who you are.
The problem with not knowing is that the ones you are making gestures for show the tendency to take you for granted. This hurts. And that is not because others don’t value you. It is due to the gap in managing your expectations simply because the reality of this life is that we can only change ourselves.
Life happened, and I became conscious of my habits. I had unmet expectations. I was hurt. That made me think that I am doing it all wrong.
I needed to set boundaries.That too, tight ones.
The pendulum shifted to the other side of the spectrum.
From doing it all to not doing anything,
What happened next was; isolation. Not due to the pandemic but the tight boundaries. Our basic necessity is to feel safe from the pain. And I was doing it all to feel safe. So I was safe but I was alone too. This is not aligned to human nature of wanting to live surrounded by people.
So where was the problem? What was I doing wrong?
Perhaps I was attempting another extreme.
I was conscious though. Just not happy with the outcomes of this approach. Also, because this is not who I am and that continued the hurt. It just wasn’t gettig any better.
The isolation however provided me the opportunity to ponder upon the way I was doing life. It became a mathematical equation. The things that I was doing right previously and what went wrong in the later. Doing everything for others while having expectations is directly proportional to hurt. While, having tight boundaries and not doing anything for others resulted in isolation.
What is missing in both is ‘acceptance’ and ‘balance’.
Once we know that we do want to live around people, that means we better accept them as they are. That then helps in managing expectations. You know that you are doing something for other solely because you want to. Not because you want them to return it.
Anyways, does this mean that I have achieve this balance all the time? No, Not at all. But yes this awareness has helped me create a bliss in relationship with my own self and others.
