The Heart Wants What The Heart Wants

Our senses guide us through life. We mostly can't imagine our lives without the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. If, any one of them is compromised, life changes for us. We try to make up for it by hightening the other senses. Yet, there are times in our lives when we feel the need or the help of a sense outside these five prime ones. Commonly known as the intuition or the sixth sense, it has helped us all in various situations in life, even before the problem may arise in many cases. Some call it the gut feeling, some say, it is the voice of God in our heart, nobody can really put a finger on it, but we all have been helped by it for sure.

Yet, we all have had instances in our lives, when, despite being poked by this sixth sense we have gone against it, and have landed up in sticky situations. At times, we didn't have any choice but to do so, and at other times, that is what we have made ourselves believe. With the pressure from the superiors, at the family, at the work, the societal pressures, more than often we find ourselves in a tight position, where we really don't have much choice. Believe it or not, most of such situations are the same as that where an elephant is chained to a plastic chair and they believe that they are tied down, unable to move at their will. Despite as many times as we have been told in the books, or the movies or by friends, and even in self-reflections, we do not listen to our heart. That, needs to change.

Since childhood, we have been taught a number of things. Those lessons have been set deep inside our minds, and they resonate at times in the form of our conscience. While most of them stand strong as principles for life, some of them have become outdated with time, and if we weigh them against the present world scenarios, some of them needs remoulding, or absolute unlearning. To carry on the cycle of society, some of these teachings have pinned us down. While we have been taught from our childhood not to judge a book by its cover, most of us do just that, to satisfy the urge of getting the social acceptance. We settle down with people that we choose, but sooner or later, when we realize that this is probably not the best of our choices, we are tied down with the idea of loyalty, no matter what, we have to stay back, or else the society won't accept us, it will label us with different harsh terms.

What we fail to realize is, how long can we continue with a crumbling structure of unhappiness. In our plight to make things look perfect from outside, we slowly fall deeper into an abyss of darkness. What we have never been taught along with the social principles is that, we cannot make anyone happy, unless we ourselves are happy. Be it our job, be it our partner, be it anything that is important to us, our heart knows what is important. We let our brains to set the priority for us, but, we must also run the list by our heart. Any glitch in that test-run and a reconsideration of the matter becomes imminent.

Pleasing people around us feels really good. The appreciation feels so nice. However, let us not turn it into a force that drives us up the wall, or makes us do things that we don't want to. We are humans, we make mistakes and we learn from them. We must take it in our strides. More than anything else, we must know, that the heart wants what the heart wants, and it will try to achieve it someday or the other. The later it will be, the more violent the outburst is going to become. So best, let's not force ourselves against our own hearts. Inner happiness can make a lot of situations, and a lot of journeys much better than they are, better than the ordinary. We must not deprive ourselves from that chance.

United We Stand

We are molded into our shapes, into what we are, who we are, by everything and everybody that surrounds us. Right from the beginning, we have seen and copied most of the things that happened around us, done by our parents, or family members. Slowly, as we begin to unfurl, going out of the inner circle, into bigger environments, where we interact with people other than our family, we get exposed to different cultures, habits, ways of life and ideas. Just as we start picking up these new traits, we are again shaped up, nipping off the unnecessary extras from us, by our teachers. Little by little, we are trained to think in a way, act in a way, judge in a way. The good and bad are pre-decided. We are taught to follow by that, to live by that. With our growth, we chance upon newer surroundings, however the primitive ideas are set within us firmly.

It is very important for our survival, that we know how to learn as we continuously grow. We must stay updated, we must go along with the time, so we must pick up new skills and ways as we move forward in life. However, what we mostly ignore, or are unaware of is the fact that, it is equally important for us to know the process of unlearning what we have learnt. Time is changing, life is changing along with it. The values, culture and ways of life are in a continuous move, and to keep up with the pace, we cannot let ourselves be tied down to what had been initially installed in us. In the process of updating ourselves, we must also recycle the old ideas to bring in the new ones. Many of us have been brought up in conservative families, with strict ideas that oppose many of the general trends that we have around us today. Legitimate words like homophobia, xenophobia and many such others have been instilled in us, day by day, in the name of right and wrong, in the name of religion, in the name of unnaturalness.

Today, standing in 2020, if we cannot unlearn them, replacing them by kindness, compassion and empathy, then evolution loses its cause. We are slowly coming to terms with ideas like 'Age is just a number'. Even today, people are fighting on movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too. In all our advancement as an entire race, we should pause and think for a moment that where is the advancement, if we cannot accept everyone as our equal and own, even today. While we teach the kids that the world out there is big and bad, we are using no chance to make it any better on our part. The world is going from big and bad, to downright mean and worse, while we sit in our house, criticizing the external affairs.

A man, who doesn't abuse a girl verbally or physically is taken to be a hero, someone out of the world, an absolute miracle. We look in awe at girls who don't speak ill of other girls, or a young guy who goes out of his way to help an elderly person. If these basic acts of life elicit such awe from us, is it not time for us to sit back and think where we have collectively put ourselves down? Why a pandemic lock down makes the roads safe, because there are no people on them, and the domestic violence and abuse case numbers fly through the roof, because everyone of those people are in their houses? Why a girl feels safer with gay men, but not with straight ones? When we have collectively abandoned the idea of consent and brought out our primal instincts to the surface so blatantly? Today  scruples and honesty are mostly seen in books, and gallantry, at the most can be seen in commercial advertisements. If that is not shameful, what is?

The Rome wasn't built in a day, building a better world will take much longer than it took to build Rome. And the task is for all of us. We have our ideas, our prejudices, our pre-installed thought processes, but with a little bit of effort, they all can be rearranged. Human beings are intelligent, capable of doing a lot, able to love so much, yet there is so much hatred around us, so much darkness. If we try individually, our love, compassion and thoughtfulness will shine out like dots of lights. A dot here and a dot there cannot counter this vast darkness, but if we try, we can light up more dots, bring in more loving hearts, grow up better humans, with better understandings of the world. A sea of dots can easily wash over the darkness. Our world looks best when it is lit up.