It is okay not to be special

Hi :name-retracted:!

I hope I don’t bore you with this letter. I feel like talking to you about life. (Which I always want to do. All the time. It’s almost like I met you yesterday and quickly got comfortable in saying things.)

So. There we go. There is a married couple somewhere on the outskirts of a town, renting a one bedroom apartment in a 10-story dull looking building. They have a median family income. (Imagine the couple in movie The Lunchbox). The family wakes up and goes to work. The wife prepares and sends him the lunchbox. And she always does thousands of other household chores, which look trivial but are as difficult as any job. The days are tiring. The couple gets together for dinner later in the evening. Let’s say they watch a movie, or a reality dance show with a celebrity guest, or maybe a scheduled TV serial, as usual. And this goes on for a long time. Like, really long time.

They constantly feel that something is missing. Suddenly, their lives look like an incomplete picture in front of them. They realize maybe they don’t have it all. So they decide to do what billions of us have decided in the past, i.e. to raise a kid. The kid gives them love to share in exchange for some financial load and a whole lot of time from both their lives. But they get happier, or maybe. Their lives go on, a bit busier than before. They are 3 people now. Everything is new to the child, so he/she is excited as hell. But the mundane stuff starts happening again. The dinner, the TV, the feeling of “something missing” from their lives.

So many of these families never figure out what was missing. I have seen a few. There are millions of them in our country.

All this time, these people look at something only to realize, they don’t have it. They look at people in the movies/serials wearing clothes which they don’t have. The house, they don’t have. The parties they don’t go to. Or the romance, as shown in the movies. All of the mainstream media shows them things that they want, but do not have. But the worst part is, that the media tells them that those things exist and there is still hope, most of which is imaginary. So, they live in the expectation of achieving something which does not exist in reality or is too tedious to get.

I have known this for a long time. But only now I realize, it’s very natural for us to do that. This has been going on for thousands of years. It’s called the human’s struggle for finding the meaning of life.

We think we live with a purpose. And that we were sent with a purpose. We invented religion to make us believe that there is a white-bearded man above the clouds, always looking at us and that he loves all of us.

So, when a self-awakened man comes and says, “You know what, we don’t exist with any purpose at all”. Or when Carl Sagan tells us about how vast our entire universe is and that we are nothing but pale blue dots in the whole picture; we feel so small. And that’s it. At this point, the one who realizes and accepts that we are not special, is known as a Buddha, and rest of us constantly miss out on life desiring to be special.

What is wrong with not being special?

Not a thing.

The reason why I am saying all this to you is that I don’t worry about our love not being what it isn’t. I am a simple guy, who thinks about the girl he loves when he wakes up and looks at her picture before going to bed in the night.

And I think as much as I accept this love as it is, the more joyful I can be.

Bas itna hi kehna tha, kuch jyada shabdon mein :)

Himanshu