It Isn’t that Bad…

The other day I was reading a quotation in the newspaper, saying that Love and failure are the only two things that give you maturity. Today wen I met Smita , my childhood friend I realized how true this fact is. Try to think about the persons, who have never fallen in love or have never suffered a major failure in life, you’ll quite probable to feel a lack of maturity among them. And this is evident from their thoughts, actions and reactions. They have never realized the deepest emotions and the feelings that come up when one has failed. When some big failures or heart breaking events take place in our lives, most of us go through a phase of depression and detachment for some time. The time depends on the how serious you were about the thing you just lost. And these are the times that give us an insight into all that life is. These times take us deep down somewhere away from everything and when we come out of them we realize that there is much that is beyond what we have lost.

When we loose someone, we tend to feel that it is the end of the world and we are into a gloom which we feel will never end. We get disinterested in everything and everyone around us. But after some time you start feeling that there are other things and options too in this world and your life. With passage of time you start coming put of your shell. It is during this state that you start appreciating numerous other things. And the most important thing is that you start knowing yourself better than ever before. You start recognizing your hidden desires, the things you always wanted to do but were too engrossed in other things to pay attention to them. You start giving thought to your talents, abilities and capabilities. Many persons take to their artistic instincts. They either go ahead to learn something or improve upon if they have already learnt something. The difference between the earlier learning and now is that a level of maturity and depth is added. The way you look at things is changed. You might have acquired an artistic skill earlier just to add it to list of things you know, or because you had a liking for it or because it was thrust upon you since your early days. But now you put yourself into these things to have peace for yourself or you like these things to be your companions in solitude.

A few years back Smita was very good at language and would do just about anything to enrich it, and had many interests that made her popular in every kind of group. She was twenty-three then and just out in the professional world. As a human she also fell in love with a colleague of hers. She was totally absorbed in her dream world . But before her dreams could take a real form, they were shattered. That is when she went into a shell and refused to believe anybody and preferred to stay aloof. If she had to be in the company of others, she would maintain such silence that each one around would feel the heat of discomfort. Best of her friends could not make her speak and one by one started drifting apart. She stayed in this state for about a year , when all she would do was to stare the ceiling of her room with her mind wandering what has happened.

After a year or so she started braking the shell at least for herself. She joined a study group to study some ancient scriptures. She always had a desire to do read them but could never manage time for it as it was divided among all the persons she was associated with in the past and there were things which always took the priority. Now that she has distanced herself from all such distractions and was completely available to herself, she whatever she did had cent percent concentration .She also started putting her free time into reading. This helped her nourish her thirst for fulfilling her literary interests. She restarted her classical dance practice. Still she was not very interested in talking to anybody and was happiest when all alone, but she did not let her mind wonder here and there but would put it in doing things that satisfied the person inside her.

In the process when she had a need to express herself, she could not relate herself with anybody. It was not that people around her were not ready to listen to her or would not have understood her and her feeling, after all we all go through it sometime or the other may be to a different extent. But as a matter of belief, she did not want to express herself. This made her one day to sit and write about all that she needed to express. And in fact all the reading that she had been doing, helped her to emerge as a writer. Today she regularly writes for a periodical and the writer in her is a gift of all the suffering that she had gone through. The literary interests and the appreciation of language were always there but it was her suffering and her failure in love that brought maturity to her thought and it was her detachment from the world that gave her enough time and concentration to put herself so well on the paper.

The positive aspect in the whole story is that with the flow of time not only is Smita coming out of her depression also a new human being is taking birth inside her who does not gets disturbed easily by life’s turmoil, probably because she has already seen the worst. Now she has an attitude which is which is more understanding of other persons’ emotions and feelings and acceptance of the life as it is and not how she wanted it to be.

As persons who can see his death approaching, are the ones who live life to the fullest, similarly when a person has suffered enough or have lost people dearest to them, start looking at life with a different perspective.

So failure is not all that bad. Imagine all that we miss if we miss failure in life.