Beyond Ourselves

Everyday, when I look at the sights around me, I am amazed at how many different facets to humanity there are. The good, bad and ugly befuddle me sometimes.
I have worked with an NGO in the past and I know that the ugliness we see is just scratching the surface. There are unimaginable horrors that lurk beneath the seemingly unrippled surfaces. Horrors that you and me, having led the lives we have, cannot even begin to contemplate. Yet, knowing these things and knowing the importance of what called “social work” (for want of a better word), I have allowed myself to slip into a manner of existence that revolves around me. Me, Myself and I. Its not as if I’ve forgotten the things that I have seen, I’ve just pushed them to the back of my mind, thinking that there’s always time to reach out to the less fortunate; I need to get my affairs into place first. What I didn’t allow myself to realize was that NOW’s the time. Waiting for the “right time” is futile, as it will probably never come. There will always be another goal to achieve, after which there will be time and resources to help out.
It’s time for all of us to think beyond ourselves and realize that we are all but insignificant to mankind at large. And unless we do something to make our lives truly meaningful, that’s what we’ll still be when its time for us to move on to the next plane. I don’t mean that we are all meant to be Mother Teresas, but I do think that we can find it in our hearts to extend a little gesture, a little effort, a little money to make someone else’s life that much better. There’s no “right” way to do these things; one doesn’t have to do them the conventional way…as long as one does. Even an hour a week devoted to helping improve someone else’s life makes a difference. Every drop in the ocean does count.
And it makes us better human beings for being able to extend ourselves beyond just ourselves!

Trust

This seems to be break-up season. Three couples I know have broken up in the past month or so, and news of more hopping onto the same bandwagon continues to pour in. A seemingly obvious issue that seems to have become rather large and important is the issue of trust. Not trust in the sense of fidelity, but trust in each other. Trust that both parties will be honest with one another and will not hurt each other. More and more couples seem to be sabotaging their relationships by withholding honesty; the foundation of any relationship.
A friend once said to me, “If two people are in a relationship, the least they can do is keep each other happy.” While I agreed wholeheartedly with the comment, it didn’t touch upon the question of trust. If two people make each other happy, but are constantly on edge because they don’t know how much to trust their significant others, what then?
Can love exist without trust? And if it does, then does the relationship stand a fighting chance? Another important question is whether trust once betrayed can be rebuilt. And how long should one wait for it to happen, within the boundaries of reasonable faith? Love, the most ambiguous of feelings, yet debatably the most powerful is complex and often hard to understand. The heart often defies the better judgment of the head, and then of course pays for it. But cynicism aside, it has to be admitted that following instinct is sometimes more beneficial.
Returning to the topic, the question of trust is not as subjective as it is claimed to be. More often than not, the lines that are crossed are lines that are universally accepted as just that…lines that mustn’t be crossed. Can it then be true that the “crosser” of these lines was indeed unaware that (s)he was crossing them?
I guess discussions like these will remain the domain of the couples that face this problem. For speculation is of no use besides that of clarity of one’s own thought. Which is what this post attempts to do.

Unemployed

….and loving every moment of it. Being unemployed is like being able to get out of one’s own city and going to another one. Nothing seems quite the same. Though you know that there will be similarities between your old city and the new one, there is still that excitement of figuring out which particular things will be the same, and which ones will be starkly different.
In my context, being unemployed does not mean sitting on my ass, doing nothing. On the Contrary. It means doing different kinds of work, with different people. It means not confining myself to one workplace, with one boss. It means working in my own time, on my own terms. In other words, it’s called freelancing.
Free lancing allows me to do impromptu lunches with friends, allows me to work from home or my client’s office, as I see fit, allows me to start work at 9 am or 9 pm, whichever I like, as long as I deliver what I’ve been hired to deliver. It gives me the freedom to live the way I choose to live. The freedom to be.
Yes, there is the occasional feeling that I’m balancing on quicksand, and could be down in a snap…..but hey, what’s life without a little risk? What’s life without the adrenaline rush that comes from doing work that excites me rather than working to justify my paycheck? Not very much, I say.
The work is better, the money is better, the satisfaction is better…I’m beginning to wonder why I was doing a job to begin with!
Freelancing…….. Sounds to me like Free Falling!