Holding on through moments

Through the journey of our life, we often take decisions which results in all the wrong things happening. I am just another normal person, taking decisions and taking onus for the mistakes I make. Apart from the others, it was from 2016 when there were thousands of things that I was handling at the same time and more often than not, plans were just not working anymore. 

I had some plan in my mind, and situations were changing so drastically that I had to do just the opposite in a matter of few seconds. Or rather the opposite was just happening to what I was contemplating.I was losing my patience, my temper, getting confused and lost more often than not. At one moment, I was deciding to move in one particular planned direction, taking a particular decision and within seconds/minutes/hours I had to or was forced to do something which was not in my plan and not a part of my decision. 

I did not even know if that step would work for me or not. Well, most of the time, they did not work. They led to further chaos, indecisive confusing moments pushing me backwards instead of enabling me to go ahead. One by one, they kept piling on. The mistakes, the wrong decisions, the wrong moves, everything seemed to be going wrong. And I was further losing my patience, day by day. During this phase, I kept feeling I had no time in hand. No time to waste. No time to wait. It was like I missed the train and would never get another one.

Someone told me during that phase ‘Plans do not always work. You plan something and something totally opposite happens. So just move with the flow. With what you have. With makes you. With what you are. And you will find yourself.’

Another best friend from my high-school days told me, ‘Upal, consider you don’t know how to swim and you have been pushed into the river/sea. You are gasping for breath because you want to survive. You are scared of drowning, of dying. Suddenly your life flashes in front of your eyes and you want to breathe. Whether you live or die, for this one moment, you want to breathe. And you don’t have time. A few seconds is all you have to rise up to the brink and get a breath. So try whatever or however you can to just grasp that one breath. The rest will follow.’

Her words passed on a light to me with the depth of her thoughts. When I actually was drowning in the sea, without knowing how to swim, (I was actually training in swimming when I was in school but had to leave it due to some reasons, so all that I managed to learn was to float.) So yes, that is what I started trying, I tried to float. Yes, I just had to make it possible to take that one breath, somehow, anyhow.

To just go on, of not being ashamed of myself for anything, not having crafted plans in life and just go on with the flow. That’s when a voice from within kept telling me, hold your breath. For days and months, I kept on trying to do that. I still do. Knowingly. Unknowingly. I lose my breath at times, but again I just struggle to rise up to the brink and breathe for a second. Or else I will drown. I would die. My mind, my body, my soul all needed that one second of oxygen. For the moment, yes.

After a certain period of time, I realized, that the darkness, the failures, the deep painful wounds gave me the push to go on. There was some light inside the deepest darkest rooms of myself. I truly learnt, nothing goes to waste. Nothing at all. A second of breath, to live in moments - one at a time, that’s the least we can do when we are fail and fall. Darkness and light, negativity and positivity - is a perception. A state of the mind. To rise up, to go on, to live – it is a fight in itself and we can do it in our own ways.