Greetings!
Life is a paradox. When we consider the dreams and actual experience, there always exists a gap – either small or big – invariably.
Lets consider some of the major milestones during our lifetime, when we dream of certain expectations from our “actions”.
1. Dreams on Joining a School
The paradox of expectations and experience in life starts, I feel, when a child is about to join a school. Most children are extremely eager to get into a school and when they reach the school, they start crying and start protesting at his/her mother to return back home with her. Something runs through the mind of the child that is unexplainable by the parents and the child is just not mature enough to express the feelings in words. This return-to-home-with-mom feeling exists for couple of weeks, but the attachment with the school grows gradually, when the fun-factor in the school increases. Over a period of time, the child gets ready even before the mom gets ready and leads the mom while walking to the school in the morning.
2. Dreams on Joining a College
By the time we finish schooling and are ready to enter a college we are more mature. We are eager to get into a college and the feeling that we are almost adults is a new pleasant feeling that we cherish for a long time. We also dream and expect a lot from college life. The paradox starts when you join a college without the company of a known schoolmate. The first few days you feel lonely; even though you are in the midst of 50+ students in the classroom. You do not know where to start and whom to make friends with. Slowly and steadily you get to know almost all the classmates and then life starts. You get few best-friends too in the process.
For most the college experience is a pleasant one filled with many small “events” that are treasured for a long time. As you near the end of the college life, you feel you should have born a year or two later. During the College Day celebrations, in your final year, you once again tend to feel lonely, because you are pretty sure that all the best friends come from different cities and are likely to go back to their respective homes.
Once you complete your Final exams you are pretty sure that you are not likely to see your best friends’ faces the next morning. That is a very hard feeling that takes many weeks to get over. There may be times when you feel that you should have been born with those friends, so that you could live with them forever.
If you are “in love” with a schoolmate then the Final Day of the exams are the hardest day and the longest day in your life. You are so used to seeing your “love” every morning and now you know that you cannot meet your “love” the next morning. The heart crackles – resulting in more love towards your “love”. You just cannot imagine the intense feeling of those who were “in love’ but did not express their love to their dream classmate.
3. Dreams on Joining a Job
When we are out of college the hunt for a dream job starts. Of course, nowadays few lucky ones graduate with a job in hand – gotten in the campus interviews. We are more matured now and have more dreams about the job – the good and bad experiences narrated by the seniors shapes our dreams and fears about the new job. On the first day of the job, you feel out of place, like a small child missing its mom when it was mercilessly pushed into a classroom the first time. Similar to that experience of a child, you tend to get out of the workplace as quickly as possible – the itch will all the more be intense, if you do not know a person who is already working in the organization. One quack of a manager can be a spoilsport to all your dreams.
4. Dreams on Falling-in-Love or Marriage
Falling in love is a different experience altogether. You don’t go in search of love and then fall-in-love. It happens either suddenly in many cases or builds up slowly over a period of time. The gestation period for falling-in-love varies between zero minutes to n number of months.
Love during school days is more of infatuation while the same is more of a relationship when we fall-in-love when we are about 22 years of age.
It is a universal fact that around adolescence to adulthood period [age 20 years – Standard Deviation of 2 years] the desire for coitus and motherhood peaks - for females. Even if not, the talk of a probable marriage by parents would lead to desire for coitus and motherhood. It is this factor that pushes many [unwilling] girls into wedlock at this age, in anticipation of a great-married life.
The same is the case for boys during adolescence. But for the boys, the desire is limited to sexperiencing and NOT parenthood or family. But socio-economic factors come into play and hence boys wait till they get into a job, gain confidence, and feel more secure before they agree for a marriage or pushed into wedlock. Even if not interested in coitus, the talk of a probable marriage would lead to desire for coitus. Once again it is this factor forces many [unwilling] guys into wedlock.
The anticipations of a girl/boy before love/marriage are many. Once married, life is joyous and results in parenthood. After the birth of the child – the bundle of joy – life starts meandering for a few years. Invariably we find a degree of dissatisfaction between what we “dreamt” and “experience”. This leads to a small crack in the relationship. In Indian context, the relationship continues “for the sake of child” or “sake-of-society”.
So sacrifices galore on the part of the husband and wife. In most cases, the ‘gap’ is seldom expressed or communicated to the partner. Dreams of a happy married life get shattered within the minds, but the marriage continues. Remember the saying “Love's pleasure lasts but a moment; love's sorrow lasts all through life”.
5. Dreams on Buying a House
Lot of dreams goes into the plans of buying a new house. Hunt for a perfect dream-home starts on an auspicious note. However we end with a package of compromise and we settle for a house based on many other factors.
Finally after buying the house and converting that into our home, we find many small irritating issues cropping up and adding to the list in the compromise package.
We always dream and anticipate something [however small or big] out of our next milestone. It is next to impossible not to dream of expectations out of our “actions”, but with the advent of Internet and access to tons of literature, we need to scale down our expectations to realistic levels. Beware that greater unrealistic anticipations leads to higher anxiety levels.
Invariably, reality is a bit harsh, but we need to overcome the shortcomings, relative to our dreams, and lead a decent and peaceful life. We should remember to say to our own mind the saying - “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”.
But it is also true that where there are dreams, there are bound to be disappointments. But can we stop dreaming?
What has been your biggest Dream n Disappointment as yet?
Sindhu
No comments:
Post a Comment