IF YOU WON'T BE YOURSELF, WHO ELSE WILL?

Picture credits: http://blog.allmyfaves.com

If you are thinking I am one of those incomprehensible advocates of taking on the world with a self-centred perspective, you are wrong, although I wouldn’t mind advocating it. There is more to life than what we think our responsibilities are, and especially what others suppose our privileges are.

Resolutely, pushing all criteria of social and moral icons aside, there comes a time when you are left to figure out if you wouldn’t want a break from whatever responsibility that has you restrained, and escape into a realm of personal passion. There is savage pleasure in having found out what we were born for, but only relentless heartache in not being able to initiate, let alone grow on it.

But, the thing is, we have become too busy pursuing stuff the others might have led us believe to be success, and we are happy because the others are happy. There isn’t much joy living the life of others for them. We have as much right to lead our lives our ways just as others have on theirs.

If you ask me, everyone was supposed to be a child prodigy, having been born with immense powers in a discipline unique; but missing to find what one is talented in, getting suppressed by the misleading society, or allowing the society to be suppressive through personal inaction leads the person astray, tying his/her path with a field so different.

Consider, for one improvised second, what would happen if Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, both men of immense talents, achievements and justifying spirits in their own fields of athleticism, were to exchange their fields. They both would fail, undoubtedly. And a miserable failure would be at that. And there will be no fighting it. Although both the games could be considered as requiring high levels of stamina and endurance, and both men could be counted on for having extraordinary levels of stamina and endurance, one’s directing them at his flippers and the other at his piston.

When two athletes could not succeed in different disciplines of athleticism, how can one hope for them to succeed in a field not having any measure of athleticism at all?

That’s why Michael Phelps could just not be born in a society-driven country like India. If he were, he would have been made to forget the flippers that he has for legs as a syndrome, and made to pursue medicine, ending up with a not-so-good-for-pay degree in engineering.

The freckled face of fate has, for the light of truth, as much distaste as for the darkened abyss of a blatant lie.

Yes, it is not easy to put into action​ what can be easily said, but a life not lived according to its God-instituted algorithm, is a life well wasted. If you can, from your deathbed, say you have lived your life, using your fullest potential the way it was meant to be, you will be, if not a super-human, a more lived human. And we don’t have much of them these days.

Do what you have to.

Originally published in Medium: https://gloriouspublication.com/if-you-wont-be-yourself-who-else-will-6a98a6620799