When a friend broke up with her boyfriend three weeks ago, she found out why she hadn’t been “feeling it”, as they say, while she was in the relationship. My friend, C, had been complaining for ages about how her boyfriend was shut off, not present, and acted as though he didn’t love her. He wasn’t the man she’d met three years ago, she said sadly. When she spoke to him after the break-up, he revealed how his father’s death (he died several months after he and my friend got together) had changed him irrevocably. And he agreed with her – he wasn’t the same guy she first met. He didn’t know how to get over the death. Worse, it was slowly killing him. Though I’d been one of the girls who hadn’t approved of C’s relationship because it pained me that she was unhappy (who wants to see their friends unhappy?), I felt immensely sad for the guy. He wasn’t a bad person. It’s just that, as C put it, he had given up on life. I write this not in judgement, but as a plea that he, and anyone else who’s in the same situation, turn that around, ASAP. It is urgent and imperative that no one gets shut off, because it affects others as well. “I felt as though he was just a corpse,” C once said. “That’s all I’d been left with.” C’s relationship hadn’t been bad. He was caring and gave her everything she wanted materially. But he’d been on auto-pilot, going through the motions of life. Which meant he had conducted his relationship without the important things that define one – passion and joy. Breaking up with him, C felt free. She also felt guilty for feeling that way, but she couldn’t live with someone who was walking wounded – someone who was almost the living dead. Defeated, she had chosen her own life over the relationship, getting out while she herself was still intact. To be shut off from life is a terrible thing, and I have no doubt that most of us have come close to that point ourselves. It may be the loss of a friendship or a relationship, or something which makes us feel that it takes away from who we are. Part of the emotional response to pain is to shut off, to mourn. But after that, one must embrace life again – not just for the sake of the people around you, but for your own. To do otherwise is to not honour the life you’ve been given, and that, to me, is a mortal sin. Life itself is an honour. To live it is a privilege. “There are only two ways to live your life – one is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is,” said scientist Albert Einstein, to whom the mysteries of life and how it works ran concurrent with science and its theories. Wise men, like poet and Sufi mystic Rumi, also say that difficulties are not put in our paths to deter us from living, but to present challenges so that we may grow, and appreciate life better. “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it,” goes one famous Rumi quote. How does one not give up on life? I believe the answer is to fight. Fight for your own life and the freedom to choose life, joy, and what it brings. The worst thing you can do is to shut off, become dead and complacent, and forget how to interact with the world. So, what are you waiting for? Life’s out there. But knowing how to take it by the horns starts with a spark from within.
Jill Alphonso - My Paper, 7 October
No comments:
Post a Comment