The Peace Within
At the end of the day, you are all you have. I say, make sure you have good.
“I am fed up of myself” said someone to me some time back. What a negative thing to say in a conversation, even more negative to begin a story with, but today I want to address this entrenched negativity within all of us, that if gets intensified with time results in a catastrophic scenario.
We are all heading towards what we call self-loathing or to elucidate, I quote a recent caption by an attractive woman on a ludicrous social media platform, “We all love self-sabotage”. I disagree. No we don’t and must not love self-sabotage. In the world of preposterous trends, self-loathing has also become a trend and let us not make it the new normal.
Most conversations I have with people involve them saying what they hate about them, what isn’t good about them, and their tirade goes on and on. Call it self-obsession, the need to hear positive things about yourself when you yourself belittle yourself or whatever, the listing by everyone about what they do not like about them has taken a front seat in the minds of most people. I remember one of my friends posting on his social platform on his birthday, “Thank you for making my day so good. For someone like me, who does not like himself or the day he was born, this meant a lot”. I felt bad for that person, not because he seemed to not like himself, or was sad but because this was coming from an attractive, smart, outgoing, and intelligent human being. It got me thinking, what is it that is wrong with liking ourselves? After knowing so much about the world and its happenings, why are we lagging behind in knowing what exactly are we lagging in life? Why have we become so used to belittling ourselves to the point where nothing that we do seems worthwhile?
Let us look at this through a story. Once upon a time there were two friends, one was called Happy and the other Unhappy. Happy was at peace with himself. He wasn’t doing much in life, going along with everything life threw at him, and wasn’t the kind of people you see running blindly, always finding faults in themselves. Then there was Unhappy. He overdid every thing. He wanted to be the best so desperately that he spent a lot of time scrutinising himself, always feeling deeply what he lacked within him. Both friends Happy and Unhappy started on the same level in the same school, but years later Happy turned out to be much more successful than Unhappy. When people looked at both the friends they wondered why Unhappy was left behind while Happy flourished. The reason as it turned out to be was pretty simple: Unhappy was so obsessed with himself that he forgot to look at the world beyond himself. Happy, though not a great hustler never failed to notice the world beyond him. While Unhappy was focused on finding faults within himself, Happy looked at those around him and learned from the mistakes of other people too, as well as his own. This little difference made a huge difference in their lives. If you take a mirror and look at your face a hundred times in a day, you are bound to find faults in it again and again, and that gets you nowhere.
In order to reach any height that you aim for, hating yourself is not a mandate. P V Sindhu is one of my favorite women. In one of her interviews she said, “At the end of the day, you need to be at peace with yourself.” This may seem like a banal statement but it changed my life for the better. In order to be the best version of yourself, you need to make peace with yourself.
I find innumerable tips these days on various platforms that write lengths on self-love, self-care and what not. I think none of this tips would help you if you wake up every day and do the same thing over and over, expecting different results. You cannot expect to love yourself if you do not develop new skills, do not go beyond your comfort level, and simply get a spa or some shopping done in the name of self-love.
While finding faults in ourselves all the time is not a good idea, some of it is useful. When the learned Kabir Das ji said, “Nindak niyare raakhie” (keep your critics closest to you), I think he would have wanted us to be our own critics too but not to an extent that decreases our productivity. I think we ought to find a balance between criticising and liking oursleves. Criticising ourself must not come at the cost of being at lesser peace with ourself.
To sum up all of this in the simplest way: If you want to have a good trip, you never want to go with a companion you do not like. Your life my friend is a long journey with you as your own companion, why do you want to make this trip difficult by not liking yourself?
You may reach out to me at sdshivanidubey@gmail.com.
