Hiralious

On a given day, at all times, we are negotiating our worth with other people. We are doing that at work, in the market and importantly, unless we are incredibly lucky, we are negotiating it in our relationships. 

As a child, we imagine politeness and a quiet attitude to be good qualities, but at workplace, it can be seen as a sign of weakness. Similarly, in relationships, if you are very nice to someone and bend over backwards to make their life easy, they can take it as a sign of your low esteem, and may even begin to appreciate someone who has more assertive qualities than you. It’s super weird and scary, right?

 Compare this to how a child loves you. The child is trusting and open to receiving love as well as reciprocating it without calculating responses in his mind or treating it as some sort of a game. As a result, you may feel that the child’s love has the element of an all-encompassing safety and reliability that is usually missing in adult relationships.

But come to think of it, the child is nothing but an adult human in his early stage. It seems that we start out knowing how to love, and how to receive love but the harsh lessons the world teaches us, takes away from us the luxury of really believing in any goodness anymore. If your trust has been broken repeatedly, if you have been abandoned unceremoniously, if you have seen sweet proclamations of undying love turn into dead-ends of indifference enough times, you are just not able to feel, or expect of people what you could when you were just a pure mind, untainted by such experiences of life. It’s all a confusion to you, and you can only accept the roses in one hand with fingers of your other hand crossed behind your back.

What feels like cynicism of people about relationships, is actually quite a rational take on the matter based on their experiences.

Maybe one day, tired, broken and betrayed, you can get up and look in the mirror and say: The cycle ends with me. I will not become in entirety, a picture of my grief. Maybe you will smile at the door man because he does such an under-appreciated job, and you will really empathize when your colleague is having a bad day, and choose it over the worry of doing the extra work. Slowly, but definitely, a web of inter-connections will develop, permeated by your love, your care, your attention, and people will feel less un-hinged around you. This is an act of you ‘becoming the change you want to see in the world’. Also, my favorite quote.