You wake up to scenarios that you had imagined way ahead in the
future, and with a pop you realize that this is it, you are an adult. (You
actually start worrying about your age! Or is it just me?!) Everything and everyone starts changing
suddenly. Or maybe your perspective does?
As person who has a habit of romanticizing the past, I find
changes like these very difficult to accept.
Have you ever noticed how we start becoming cautious about people
that we meet? We think ten times before becoming friends with someone and start
shying away from people who are different than us. Even if we don't want to, we
think about how they look, where they come from and if they are going to be
useful to us sometime in the future. We hesitate to invest in people
financially, psychologically and emotionally. There is also the danger of us
wanting to surround ourselves with people who make us feel good about
ourselves. We start making connections or contacts or networks or whatever you
want to call it instead of real long lasting friendships. May be it is the fear
of getting hurt, maybe it is an attempt to stay away from the truth that we
might not want to hear or maybe it is just the pressure of today’s
hard-to-break financial lifestyle.
A revelation hit me when I met an old friend two months ago. I was
meeting her after a very long time. I was very excited to meet her as she had
been recently engaged. Sitting there in that cafe, talking to her, I had one of
the most unbearable experiences I've ever had. She had changed so much. When I
asked her about her fiancé I was provided with a balance sheet of his family.
They had x number of flats in x number of cities, they x sources of income,
they had a lot of shiny cars and they were going to spend sacks of money on the
wedding, etc etc. I could hardly relate to her anymore. We spoke on many more
topics and all it did was make me very agitated. This stranger was not the girl
who brought me Tiffin from home every day because I missed home cooked
food. I could hardly stand to see her like that. After an agonizingly long,
squirmy hour, I made some excuse and literally ran home.
I had a wake-up call. I asked myself, had I stopped being an
organic friend? All relationships transition with time but was I too looking at
people like assets and liabilities now? Was I becoming hard- hearted, wanting
to discard people who did not fit in the script I had written for my life?
Adulthood is going to change you, but how much?
These questions only added to the ideological fluctuations I was
having at that time. I felt extremely lonely. It was a suffocating loneliness
that did not let me cry, did not let me talk to anyone and that made me feel
like that child who had finally discovered that parents do not have the answer
to everything in life. For the first time in my life I felt that heaviness you
feel so many times as an adult.
What do you in times like this? You talk to people who might not
always tell you what you want to hear but give you their honest opinions when
you ask them to. And who are these people?
Your friends!
I had a totally different itinerary, one that did not include
Mumbai. I had a lot of people in Mumbai that I knew I could talk to. Old
friends, new friends, people that I admired, many that I had strong bonds with.
Also I had never really spent time exploring Mumbai on my own in all my visits.
Two days before I left my house I impulsively decided to ditch Khajuraho and
spend a few days in this city instead.
I might disappoint you, but in the very beginning of my journey I
did not do anything that I had set out to do. Instead I met and reconnected
with some of the coolest people I know.
I wandered aimlessly in the city with these friends. I got to do
the whole tourist bit, visiting Gateway of India and the Chowpatty beaches. We
sat for hours and had long conversations about various topics, some extremely
meaningful talks and some not so much. We giggled and cried together, sharing
our worst fears. Older people that I bumped into shared their experiences and
how they had handled such dilemmas in their lives. I lost count of the times I
squealed ‘exactly!’ with relief when someone said something that I could relate
to completely.
Also what I did was that I recorded as many conversations I could
on my phone. I replayed these again and again on my phone while traveling and
kind of scrutinized them and thought a lot. I will come back to these
conversations and the places I visited in Mumbai in another post.
Although I am still indecisive, going to Mumbai was definitely
better than going to counsellor!
