household
how love, hate & grief are the buy 1 get 3 you didn't sign up for
note:
i’ve been letting my words marinate for 4-8 weeks before i hit publish. the hypothesis is that reducing the urge to instantly publish a half-baked, written-in-one-go piece will help add more flesh & flavour to my expression; partly, i’ve also plateaued in terms of the way i write, what i write about & how i write it — i want to become a better writer for the next 50 yrs, so iteration is important
we house a home in our own self, we seek shelter & comfort in our own company when we’re lonely, nourishing ourselves with tiny little acts we call self love; your “me time” is when you want to be home; when you’re ever so often chilling at the patio of your hipocmps for
i spent all of my last 6 months up here; for good or for worse, i learnt about who i honestly am. it wasn’t a conscious decision, but a lot of inaction/failure led me here against my own good will. there weeks & months of self loathing, chasing idealism, living in the past, cursing et al.
against my better judgement, i did not live in the present. i spent more time thinking than really doing something to change the -ve’s i needed to change. the good bit was spending time in the unkept corners, the dark grunge spaces, the magnanimous halls & the lesser-known closets — i realised how many people really live inside this house of mine and how none of them define me.
i traced-back the conditioning of my brain, thoughts, feelings & why am i the way i am? trying to answer what i failed to answer for long: who am i?
my face, ,my name, what i do, what i am upto right now, aren’t the permanent parts to my existence. they change. the only permanent part of my being, is awareness itself. you, just like me, could trap yourself into thinking your awareness is altering when you grasp on to all your thoughts & feelings and associating them to yourself as a part of you identity, but the second you let them go, treat thoughts like how thoughts should be, you go back to our natural state of awareness.
the voice in your head isn’t you.
you are the one listening.
and when you listen, you learn.
amongst a lot of good bad & the ugly, what i want to throw more light on today, are 3 sing-sang-song out of the innumerable members, visitors, parasites & monsters living rent-free in this house;
that while the raja-beta of my household, the elder sibling, love, loves there will always be hate, the middle child, hanging around, never evident, never in the limelight, but always there - for what? for whom? you ask? for all, i answer, followed by the nuisance of the household: grief, the youngest child knows only how to crib, complain, and squirm at every thing going wrong/ who has a love/hate relationship with love/hate.
you can’t be palsy-walsy with just one; god has this perpetual buy 1 get 3 offer luring you into the store of life, you’re all jolly because now you think you get so much for the price of one. the hoarder in us is enjoying the store like a child visiting the up-scale hypermarket where everything looks fancy & every fleeting second you find an eye-candy you wish you could have. you end buying what you truly need, (i.e. love for me) but little do i know that the other 2 invisible toddlers have made way to my shopping basket. you never truly know you’ve bought them, till you run out of love, that’s when they show up — you know you need to refill your love ka dabba, but all you’re left with are the freebies that came along. you feel the urge to visit this store of life & hoard all the love you can, but god only invites you to the store when he feels like. it’s not your choice, for money isn’t the currency he transacts in. he decides when you visit, how you visit and more often then not, he ends up filling your shopping cart. (while you think you’re the one choosing)
but love, man. to love unconditionally, to love with everything you’ve got is the best gift god has bestowed upon us humans — to make them feel loved, somehow, that’s been the consistent choice i’ve always made. to seek happiness in giving love, than receiving it. love is different, man. it’s when you’re concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own. my greatest of achievements is to make people i truly love — smile & make them happy, to make their life convenient (even if its against your will), to lurk around (likely knowing i won’t be too helpful), but there’s no where else i’d rather be in those moments.
love is like salt, you need it for all the dishes you wish to make, but namak to swaad anusaar hi dalta haina? thodi cheezon mein zyaada, kuch mein kam. the tricky part is when you’ve put in salt, apne swaad anusaar, lekin unhein zyaada chahiyein. more than how much you want to put. what do you do, then? tumne to aapna saara namak daal diya. unke liye shayad fir bhi kam padd gaya. :/
worst are the times when you run out of salt. everything you make feels incomplete, the food just doesn’t taste the same — i would rate dal rice with ideal salt vis-a-vis the biryani that demands 50 ingredients, but it lacks salt. namak pyaar hai behenc*od, iske sivay khaana hamesha feeka hi rahega.
have you ever observed how seamlessly salt dissolves in water? that’s what love does too, you can never see if salt was used or not, it dissolves before you can make a good long yawn, you only know it was used when you consume it. so is love, you never really know it till
you’re now frantically looking for the salt ka dabba in your kitchen but you just can’t seem to find it. and when you do, you’re happy. you usually have a spot to find where salt is, but you don’t know where to find grief & hate. they only show themselves in the after-math of the meal. “yaar ye to bohot teekha hai”, “isko na, agli baar, aise banana”, “mazza nahi aaya yaar” — that’s your guests, to whom you gave all your love, inviting hate & grief onto the dinning table. you never want to hate, or grieve. but you will. because that’s how people are. they don’t understand everything you did to present them with that meal, the meal that was made after long hours of toiling in the heat, the part nobody saw or acknowledged — that meal, was your labour of love, a meal made for pleasure, not reward. but what are you left with? taunts, and these is where, again, the two uninvited siblings of love show up.
everything you love, will have grief. you let grief simmer in the dal a little more, and you’ll get hate. the point im trying to make is that grief & hate are by-products of love. they’re like the RGB (red, green & blue) of colour. you can make almost make any colour of choice, from these 3. any.
everything you feel, mourn, cherish, enjoy — everything that you’ve ever felt, has come either place of longing (love), sadness (grief) or disdain (hate)
you can be asked to hate the things you love, you will hate the grief, you will sometimes have to love what you hate, you will love what grieving brings to you, you will grieve the loss of love, and you will certainly grieve doing what you hate.
when your love for something goes away, you will have to hate to un-love it. not all things can be happy go lucky forever, sadly — but that’s life. your emotion towards anything will change. it will never be static; they’re far more dynamic in nature than you & i can comprehend.
i know i’ll always be full of love for my friends, family and my partner (future tense), i will hate them for the little things, and they will hate me too — lekin meri dal mein hamesha namak hoga
