Why the culprit?

Life's long, life's strange and life's full of different types of people around. Someone you would like, someone you would deeply love and someone you would like to be friends with. But its a mix bag. Many a times in our lives we come across people we don't like, the kinds we like to despise. The kind we either choose to bitch about or if we act to be strong enough, choose to simply ignore. But the point is are they the bad people?

Well, I guess that's a relative term. No one can be just bad as no one can be just good. And good and bad are simply sides of the same coin. From the other end of the line, it might be the same. Someone would say there is no definite good and bad. There's always an in between we call the gray area. But then how do we decide what is it and where are we? And then there are always things which can be directly put into the basket of the bad. 

But lately I have been thinking why would someone do what is bad. Like, why would someone hurt anybody? Aren't we all the same, innocent when we were born. No one just grows up deciding he wants to be a murderer, right? Then how do they become what they have become? 

I have a theory. 

I have heard a story where the souls who end up in hell are tortured beyond eternity, to an extent that they would give anything up for that to end. Initially I thought who would do that to someone and why! But very soon I found the answer. After decades and decades of this agony, those poor souls are given an option. They are given a way out. No, of course not out of the hell, but out of this pain, this state. They are made to chose between what they want to become, a predator or a prey. They want to be the ones who are perpetrator or the ones who are victims . Now obviously no one would agree to hurting anyone if they are not put into the situation where they have to choose between their own misery and the others. No one would shoot the other person if he himself is not at the gun point. 

So that poor soul ultimately becomes the one hurting others. This is an endless cycle.

Then again this was a far-fetched example of this. If we look into our own lives we might have a few people we feel could do better but they choose not to. Like the friend who keeps betraying you and you end up being disappointed in yourself for you were a fool to trust that person again. But then I think his life, his journey made him so. He might have faced all that himself and now he has decided to mold in a way that wouldn't be as hurtful. Or the lover who keeps on letting you down because you have too much expectations. He might be trying to do things the best way he knows but he has lived a different life and he has seen and done things differently. Or the friend turned boss who used to be very nice and warm but has refused to even have lunch with you. It might not be huge but think that he might have his own reasons for that. He might have to face something we have no idea about which has changed him to this.

I have been trying to justify every incident just like these, with me or someone else and I don't see a single example where the actions of the others can't be justified. Even if the other person has done something bad to you, something must have happened in the past that has changed this person, from someone who wanted to just spread happiness all around to someone who is the reason for someone else's sorrow.

What I deduced out of this is a man would do bad if put into such a situation. When he has something to loose himself only then he would think about doing it. A man becomes what he is because of what he has gone through. If someone has trust issues, its because  he has been betrayed more often than not. If someone looses the enthusiasm to do good, its because he might not have found good around him. If someone's not happy to help, it might be because he didn't get any help when he desperately needed it. Every day every moment changes us in some way. It shapes us into what we will become. Not everyone may have the courage and power to resist the bad around and not everyone actually dares to choose the more difficult path if the wrong one is the easier one. 

You might have been on the hurting side of it, and I sincerely hope nothing happens to you along the way that turns you into that person. You can't choose the things life is going to throw at you but you can definitely control the choices in that moment. You can definitely chose to let go. Because this bitterness you have for all the bad things that has happened to you will turn you into a bitter person and thus throw you on the other side and it might not be a pleasant thing. There is hope if you feel you have turned a bit cold, there is still hope if you wonder so. There is still a hope for you to see the brightness of day and there is still hope if you don't want to be the culprit of someone else's bad.

Dear Deadline

I might not be a fan of it but I understand it is good. Its good when we are working and its good when we are living. I have been thinking of the scenarios I have been thrown at so far and I feel it is necessary.

Take our job for example, if we are not in rush, if we don't have a date when we have to finish it we will be taking more time. Now I won't say unrealistic deadlines are a key but yes the ones that challenge us and the ones that make us push our boundaries are sweet! Now when we are given a deadline, at the moment we feel angry about it, we feel that the need to fix up a timeline for everything is not necessary but when we solemnly think about it we understand the need. We might think at that time that we would have been able to learn more if not given an end date but we might have not completed the task with that pace either. That adrenaline rush we get when we decide to complete the given task in a day or may be in an hour, that is a good feeling. The feeling when we challenge ourselves and we get out of it victorious is unimaginable. Why just job, take studies too. When given a date of exam, only then we think we really need to study and finish that course before that. Imagine a world without any exam at all. Seems nice at first, but leaves us with no real experience or growth.

Having goals is important but attaching a date with it is equally necessary. Somethings might take up more time than others but at the end, they need to be completed within that time. This is what pushes us and makes us work a little harder than before. This is what drives us.

When we have the feeling that this time is not forever, this phase of life in which we are in will pass too, its then we feel we want to make the most out of it. When we go to some place for vacations, we know we are there for a couple of days only and we have this list of things we want to see or do there. This is what drives us. Now imagine if you stay in that place forever at the time being, you know you always have the option do to that thing tomorrow, or day after that. You know you are not time bound, and this right there goes on. Which is why we barely visit places where we live.

You know why? Because we take it for granted. We know today or tomorrow it will be there. We do the exact thing with the people we love. We do this to our own life!

When in the back of our mind, we have this thought that this might not be the same tomorrow, we create an urgency. But otherwise, we just get too comfortable that it end up being dull. Remember the school/college time when we always wanted to be a part of everything and to enjoy the time to the fullest, we knew this privilege is not forever. We were not sure if we were gonna see people around us after a few years, we were not sure if we will be in the same city as them, we were not sure if today's loved ones will even be in our tomorrow. We were so unsure yet so happy. And today we have this illusion that we know where life will take us in next 5 years, who will be around us then, what will we be doing with our lives. We think that we know everything and we are so sure. But what we  don't realize is that we might be stable, in terms of location, job, or people around us, the life is still not certain, and it will also change. After all that we have been through, now when its most important, we have got too safe and stupid to think that this will stay the same. We think this is how life is going to stay and thus we have been doing things the exact same way we were doing like a year ago. We have stopped stopping and looking back and thinking and looking forward and dreaming.  We have stopped putting that effort we used to make, to make a day meaningful and have fallen in the trap of mundanes. And why? Because we have not set up a deadline.

When we knew our high school is going to last for a few years, you wanted to spend it with your friends and make new memories, have fun with them because we knew its a limited time. When we knew college is going to last for 4 years, we were determined to experience everything and to learn and love and live. And the time when we were in our first job, and we wanted to make the most out of our money and time and so we worked for it, we worked for us, without a break because we were not taking it for granted because the rush of it was limited.  But now, what we see is indefinite period of work and no set deadlines. We have turned our blind eye towards our own lives and happiness and we just keep on going on. Day after day, week after week, we just spend our days, thinking about all the things we wanted to know, all the things we need to cross off our check list but because we gave ourselves infinite time to achieve that it is taking forever to actually do that. We don't remember that the clock is still ticking even if we choose to ignore it. Time is passing even if we are not ready for it.Because we keep saying to ourselves from tomorrow and everyone knows tomorrow never comes.


This post is meant to mark an end to my 'from tomorrow'. I hope it will do it for you too :)