A conversation between my mother and me.
’You don’t look cheerful like usual mamma, ’ I say over the dining table. Dad and my sister were hanging out. I had a test so I stayed back and with me, my mommy.
’No, why don’t I?’
Shrug.
’I mean, why do you say that?’ Obviously I’d brought her out of a trance of thought.
’You haven’t said a thing since morning.’
’It’s your health, ’ she said(I was down with something of a chronic upset stomach for three months just then).’Every third day you complain of aches and pains.’
’Wonder why I’m eating still, though.’
She smiles broadly.
’I worry about your health very much, sweetie.’
’I suffer everything and still am cheery enough. And you just watch it and conk off.’
’You’re my son. You’ll know when you’ve a family of your own.’
’Not in a hurry, am I?!’
For three days after that, my mother reserved herself completely, didn’t come out into the house too much, lay on the bed. She had gotten very reticent and irritable, very cranky, on the verge of tears litteraly. She livened up a bit on her birthday but my darn tummy chose that day to lurch out my lunch in the evening- so she had her party cancelled. She was positively depressed.
And me, with a nasty stomach, was enjoying life as much as possible, hanging out, watching movies(writing reviews)! It was then that I first committed myself into understanding this relationship better and typically the machinations of the mind regarding it. And my findings were disturbing. I developed something of a hypothesis about stress. Let me give you this hypothesis and suggestions on how to counter it in an organized fashion:
Contention One: Stress is a convenient scapegoat for failures
I have found that, excluding my dear mommy, that those who complain of a lot of stress and tension are often not doing particularly well in their work or studies. More often than not, these bouts of stress are triggerred after a nasty report card. I suppose it is natural that the mind finds its own way of pasting the blame on someone else’s but* by conveniently feeling stressed and tense. When a young man of fifteen has tears in his eyes, bangs his fist on the table, buries his face in his hands and wails, ’I’ve got so much tension in life!’ nobody has the heart to point out that nasty report card.
I’m not saying it’s intentional. It’s convenient and it’s natural, very natural, to come out with such excuses, I daresay, for failures.
Your Counter-attack: Don’t give a damn
You know you’re bound to fail some day, and probably fail miserably, in something or the other. Each time you write a test, or go through an interview or do something of that sort, assume right after it gets over that your performance was clown-like and if you get selected, it’ll only be because of the entertainment you provided in it. It’s not how you approach before it happens, mind you. And never say you won’t make it. Just do one thing, as submarine Captain said aboard the K-19: Brace for impact!.
Contention Two: There is no real stress. It’s all in the mind
Take my mother’s example. Doctors had made it plain and straight that I’m suffering nothing serious or mysterious at all. I was a cholic baby(as a toddler) and that tendency of the stomach lining to contract on taking in food is surfacing again: a disorder that will go away in four to five months. So she knew very well that I wasn’t on a roll. I wasn’t loosing weight, wasn’t getting exhausted easily and I showed no signs of shut down. So there wasn’t any reason for her to be worried. Yes, seeing your own son complaining of tummy-aches all the time isn’t a happy thing. But to the organized mind, it’s only another adventure- a bad one, at that.
So I found in a few other cases of my friends as well. Their grades had kicked off a bit but were picking up slowly and they were standing at their normal positions in the tests. Still they constantly complained mournfully about being sick at Math or being complete suckers at Physics. That was a lie! They were scoring 7 out of ten and saying they’re miserable. Well, given that they did a perfect 10 all the time, it was a little dissappointing, but hey seven is not bad at all. I’ll kill for that.
Your Counter-attack:No one can beat me:
It is only for a few times in your life that I’ll be asking you to build an ego. The world is grey as I say all the time. Ego is also not completely bad. If you have a little snobbery inside you a little arrogance and self-belief, then things work out pretty well. You should be insolent and say that it’s not possible you’ll not do well. If you don’t do well, just wrinkle the nose and say’look-who’s-talking’. Well, not in that snobbish manner, but generally say that it wasn’t very likely for you to do much better. Saying that has an effect. But repeat to yourself this one thing: I can win.
And as far as cases like my mummy are concerned, repeat to yourself all the time: If it’s someone I love, God’s scared to touch him!
Contention Three: Personal grief is the only real stress
It’s not that stress is just a convenient scapegoat or a distortion of an escapist mind. It is indeed very often real and palpable. It is this stress that is the most dangerous, and the less common. Personal failures or quirks of emotion like my mommy are the ones that can be tackled immideately and easily. It is the stress related to personal losses, like bereavement or heart-breaks that last very long, are real, and can not be tackled easily. Though you and I are complete individuals, we associate our existence with others and when those people die or let go of us, it is hard to come over it.
Well let me tell you what. If you love someone, love them. Give all that you can to them, live for them, love them like you’re crazy. But pray, don’t expect it to come back. You set a caged dove free so that it can fly and adorn the sky, not because you want it to come back. Shower all the love you can and feel on them, stand by them, offer them your shoulder to cry on, your face to kiss and your smile to enjoy. But don’t expect it to come back.
And when such a person dies, remember him with all that love. Pretend he’s with you every night and give your pillow a mighty kiss. It works. In his death, he will love you and you will love him.(of course the gender of the personal pronoun is not specific). Dead people don’t go far away but actually come nearer to you because now they can live in your hearts. You can still love them and feel the same pleasure of it like before.
And if they ditch you, it doesn’t stop you from loving them because you didn’t expect them to love you back. Let it be easy.
It’s so easy to say but extremely hard to do. But in this world full of complicated individuals, this is how you’ve got to prepare yourself. You do what you feel like doing and let them do what they want. That’s not your business.
As an Ending Note
It is important that one remembers something very clearly: the destinies of nobody other than yourself are in your hand. So you can’t set your heart on what others would do. You’ve got to keep it all the time in your mind that anybody could let you down without warning. Don’t keep expecting it till it happens or keep brooding on it once it’s over. Take life as it comes at you.
The basic message: Detach yourself from the world, treat it like a website community and enjoy it as you enjoy MouthShut. Only, love it a lot more, a lot-lot more.