Where are you?

In a sense, everything I have done in my life till now has been for you. For your love, my perfect soulmate. Every change that happened in me was triggered by you. For your love, I strived to be a better man again and again. I strived to grow and develop to be worthy of you. But I am so tired of striving alone. I want to keep growing, I don’t want to become secure and stop growing. But I also feel so lonely. I feel an acute sense of loss, like I have lost a loved one. Except you were never with me to start with, but still your memory has been with me since forever. I remember you, and have remembered you ever since I became mature.

And yet you remain so elusive. I wonder if I am destined to feel this way forever. Forever trying to find an elusive soulmate. Forever lonely, living in your memory. I have a theory – the thing that you desire the most is the thing that will elude you the most. The moment it stops mattering, it will fall into your lap on its own. So the question is how to get over the feeling of loneliness on my own. I think as long as I am lonely for a soulmate, I will never find her. I will imagine her in every girl I get on talking terms with her, and will hence not be able to really be just good friends to start with.

Hopeless love

While the last piece was a scholarly write-up on love, this one is a very personal experience of love.

I’ve been going to dance classes for more than 4 months now. A girl whom I found very attractive offered me a lift on her own. She saw me walking, and stopped to ask me if I wanted a lift. I was hoping that she would, and I was really quite kicked when she did. She’s an airhostess, and was driving a ford ikon rather confidently. I pretended that I had forgotten her name, and asked her for her name again. Mostly I guess as a comfortable conversation starter. We chit chatted a bit, she went a bit out of her way to drop me. And ever since, I’ve been doing nothing but thinking about her.

I feel like such a dumb immature teenager sometimes. All she did was to offer me a lift, and here I am already thinking of how for our honeymoon she can probably get us air tickets to any place in the world. I’ve been working out detailed scenarios of how I will show her my world, expand her horizons. I’ve been going over scenarios of me cooking lunch for her, showing her my house.

And this is exactly the reason why the thing that I desire the most remains so elusive. Now that I have charted out our whole future together, how can I possibly look at her as just another girl and first try to be just friends. I will never be able to ask her just as a casual friend if she wants to hang out with me. I will just feel too shy and hesitant around her because I have made it into such a big deal. I will read too much into her every move. I will start acting cool so that she doesn’t suspect I feel this way about her, I will feel guilty of having such thoughts about her, overall a pathetic mess.

I have got to get out of this vicious circle!

Detached Love

When I was in my final year of MBA in my final semester, we had a course on personality growth through psychometric instruments. Needless to say, it was a very intellectual course, and yet at the same time it helped us to look at our emotions through the prism of our mind. Most of us have a whole range of emotions which we accept as our unique personality, something that defines us and to a large extent these emotions happen on their own without any conscious choice on our part. But we can choose what type of emotions we want to have.

One example of this that I have is strategic anger. What is the point of getting angry if it is not going to change anything. But if getting angry serves a purpose - say if a shopkeeper is trying to cheat you, and you want to scare him into giving in - then it is most beneficial to get angry. 

But to come back to the point, the instructor told us about detached love. He said that every time he does this course, what he feels for his students is detached love. The love he feels for his students helps him to be closer to them, to empathize better with them and to intuit their emotional states and help them in their emotional well-being. And yet the love is detached in the sense that he is able to leave it behind him when he goes home to his family. He is able to let it go when the course ends and he is able to feel it again for the next batch that comes in. This love does not rule his mind and allows him to empathize with the emotions of the students and yet remain unaffected by it.

This is really a very powerful concept if one can apply this in real life. I feel this same type of detached love for my employees, for my students, for my vendors for everyone whom I am in close contact with. There may be a few I deal with whom I don’t like, but by and large I consciously try to develop this detached love with at least my students. This is what makes me an unbeatable teacher. I can not only make a small group of students feel my love, but I can do it even with a large group and with many groups. I think this is the hallmark of great spiritual gurus like shri shri ravi shankar, They can make tens of thousands of people feel their love and hence they have such a large and devoted following.

How did I develop this capacity of detached love? Well, it came from a basic realization that love is really the most important thing in life. It is the memory of love that we cherish the most, not memories of money and other worldly pleasures. Love is what causes us to grow and expand our boundaries. The more we love, the more we learn and grow. I was inspired by two authors to develop this type of thinking – Richard Bach and M. Scott Peck.