Waves don’t die

I want to be fit. I want to travel. I want to trek. I want to explore the city. I want to write. I want to draw.

But I don’t. I keep thinking I will do this and do that. But it doesn’t happen.

I am at a place in life where I come by new and unique encounters, opportunities and people everyday. Every third experience is a completely new experience and every situation I’m faced with is a new one.

I remember a time when I was around 16, when things around me were rapidly changing. I suddenly woke up one day and decided to not pursue the career of a pilot anymore, the career I had built my whatever life I had then, around. I had a realization then that I suck at & lot of things in life which I wanted to be good at, from getting fitter to having better habits. And this pursuit of flipping the reality around me took a lot from me emotionally. I used to get emotionally attached to seemingly meaningless things and get anxious and excited too much and too often. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t ashamed to feel these feelings, it was just that in the mind*cking situations I used to place myself in every now and then, I used to get easily handicapped by those emotions, making rash and illogical decisions, which cost me my ability to respect myself.

It was almost a year later when I realized I needed to change this in my life and I came across stoicism. It was apparently the next step in holistic self-improvement, at least according to the internet gurus. The next chapter.
Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophy which is based around having “control over the controllable” in terms of the situations in your life and how you can better deal with it.

I started studying it. Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Seneca, I became obsessed. The perspectives these philosophies offered me was something that I had never learned anywhere else. I soon started applying the principles of what these great minds had written centuries ago, and soon enough I found myself with a heightened sense of emotional understanding of the things around me, to the point where people praised me for being “sorted”. Although that wasn’t nearly the case, as I would find out later.

I soon realized that amidst trying to detach from everything around me, I started having a mechanical approach to life. The highs I felt always came with a strong wave of self-doubt and thalows were just periods where I felt nothing in particular, although it was clear that something was wrong. This became more prominent with time. It was just a few weeks ago when I came to the bitter realization that I do not have the same kind of passion I used to before. Hobbies don’t feel the same anymore, and every other decision in my life is being made completely logically, as if a board of sophisticated people in suits and ties were sitting in my mind and making these decisions for me. I have realized that in this pursuit of being ‘calm’ and ‘stoic’ all the time, I guarded myself from feeling almost anything at all.

In the midst of this exploration, I discovered the importance of balance. It’s crucial to know when to detach and when to engage, when to accept and when to change. Now as I find myself in yet another period of rapid change and new experiences, I approach it with a more nuanced perspective. I embrace the novelty and uncertainty with the same sense of logical understanding, but I try not to completely negate the feelings that inevitably come with it.

It’s not going to be an easy process, but I’m sure I’ll emerge a better person from it. Because a life without waves is not a life worth living.

– Shardul