Choices

2024-05-17 00:00:00 +0000

“Hey”, she muttered

“Hmm?”

They were walking down the road together. The sky was clear, and a cool breeze was blowing. It was a peaceful night. Atleast, from the outside, it looked peaceful. Storms were raging inside his head. He felt empty, hollow, with nothing to support his what felt like a shell of a body. Like a star at the end of it’s lifetime, he felt like he might implode any moment, going out in a flash of light and dust, blown away by the winds. She was walking beside him, although not that he felt it–his mind was elsewhere, on a ledge near an abyss, hanging on for dear life, nobody to help him this time.

“Hey? _____, tell me what’s wrong.” she muttered again

“Hmm?”, he woke up from his reverie, his mind temporarily brought away from the hanging ledge.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing”

“Oi, come on. Tell.”

“Nothing for you to worry about, atleast. Not that it matters anyway.”

“It does. Your feelings matter.”

“They do?”, he turned towards her. He tried to hide the strain in his voice. He was feeling tired already. This was too much.

“Yeah”

“I don’t think so. They never did I suppose. Atleast to other people, here or near me. They only show that they do.”

“Are you angry?”

“Why will I be angry? About what?”

“About me dating him, your friend?”

“Why will I be? Rather, why should I be? It is a choice which you two mutually made. I respect you guys enough to honour your choices and…live with it.” He looked away as he said the last bit. He was not angry. He was really tired at this point. Of all of this. Of people. Of their words. Of their faces. Of their thoughts.

“Come on. I had already warned you that I did like someone.”

He continued calmly, “Yeah? So did he, indirectly, and how you two kept making a show of it for a week or two whenever I tried to clarify what was going on? Kept the carrot hanging in front of me, letting me chase it with my tongue out, while you guys, holding the pole, giggled at my predicament, all the while asking me not to worry and accept things as they are, for they happen for the best? Quite the warning.”

“Hey…”

“It’s fine. I am not angry. You were just a friend after all. There was never any hard-and-fast restriction on you guys dating anyway, and you made the choice.”

She started confidently, “But we felt good with each other, at ease. It just happens, and it’s not about choosing…”, she continued but he interrupted her.

“I repeat. You guys made the choice.”

She tried to add something, but he raised his hand.

“Let me finish, please.”

“The one thing that I have realised in all these days is that people are what they choose, and everything is a choice. EVERYTHING.”

He took a breath, and continued,

“Feelings matter. They matter a lot, and they very much influence how easy/hard making that choice will be, but they change dynamically over time. That’s how people fall out of love, lose feelings of kinship. Such feelings are temporary, some a bit more volatile than the other, but temporary. They change, evolve, and turn into other things, and you may ultimately lose them. And that is perfectly okay. It is how humans are. We feel for a whole lot of people in this world, and that is normal. It is our nature, our “wild” nature you can say. But…”

” …What distinguishes people from animals is their ability to think and choose, especially when it really matters, however hard the choice maybe. If you only let your feelings hold your sway then you will be no more than an animal in the wild. The nature of committment to any kind of inter-personal relationship is basically the choice to keep on choosing that person and maintaining that relation with them, even when your feelings differ on that respect.”

“Let me give the example of being in a relationship with someone you love. Of course, you won’t get into a relationship with a person for whom you don’t feel for, with a person towards whom you can’t express any feelings of love towards. But suppose you do feel for a person, whatever that maybe. Feelings of love, feelings of irreplacibilty, I will not go into the nuances of that. What matters is, you feel like going into a relationship, which means that not only you really love that person enough, but you also commit to loving that person for as long as you can. And what is this committment? To choose this person everytime, when it matters. To choose to keep on loving this person, as long as you can. Even if at some point you stop getting the butterflies seeing him everytime, even if you don’t feel like telling him everything that happened in your life today–whatever it is, even if you don’t find a reason to love this person today, the decision to try and look for other things which can maybe cause you to feel those butterflies again–that is what is committment. To, at the end of the day, choose that person EVERY-TIME. And whenever you feel like it is not working out, when you are not able to feel for that person at all, to choose to sit down and talk about it, and sort it out. Ending a relationship is basically deciding not to choose that person from now on, the reason for which may be various, the next time when it comes to it. Even if you maybe still have lingering feelings for each other, you decide not to choose that person anymore when you ordinarily would have.”

“And that is what moving on means. To finally decide from henceforth not to choose that person everytime, even if you still have feelings, however weak or strong. Your feelings may make that decision difficult accordingly, and that is what makes moving on so difficult.”

“Now remember, every choice has it’s consequences, no matter how rough, which you must be prepared to face when you are making the choice. People who say they have ‘committment issues’ suffer not from the fear of going into relationships or the choice of going into one, but rather the consequences of what their choices may entail. They do not want to take the responsibility of whatever consequences their actions may have on those around them, because maybe the consequences last time were too much to bear and they do not want to be reminded of them anymore, not atleast anytime soon. That is why they talk about no committments, for when push comes to shove, they are not ready to face the consequences of choosing you.”

Both of them were silent for a while. Then he looked her in the eye, and continued.

“Now that you heard me, I want to ask both of you this question–do not take this lightly, and I want it from you now: Are you ready to choose my friend everytime, even if push comes to shove, even when you know the consequences after each such choice may grow progressively worse as time goes on? Are you ready to commit to each other, to the truest sense of the word, just like I am as of now if it came to you?”

The wind blew a little too strong, and the birds woke up from their sleep. If there was any passerby who was within earshot distance of the two, he would not have been able to listen to the sound coming from the mouth of the girl as it moved. Silence soon pervaded their surroundings again, and he walked ahead of her, his mind wandering back to the ledge. He was tired of everything. Of people. Of their words. Of their faces. Of their thoughts. Of their indecisiveness. Of their choices.

Ice Cream

2024-01-24 00:00:00 +0000

“You like me, don’t you?”

The road was mostly empty, the shop where they bought their ice creams from slowly fading into the distance. A couple of people were out to take a walk after dinner, adding to the otherwise silent ambience of the surroundings. As she asked this question, he looked up from his ice cream towards her. She seemed slightly uncomfortable as she asked this question, her face staring into the distance. Her ice cream was still in her hand.

“What makes you ask this?” He asked, smiling a little. He had kind of anticipated this was coming.

“Well, it felt kind of off, you asking me out for ice creams in this cold weather, that too twice.”

“You like ice creams dont you?”

“Yeah I do…”

Silence pervaded their conversation for a while. Then he let out a deep sigh.

“Yes, you inferred correctly. I do like you”. He smiled, feeling a bit uncomfortable making the admission. The last time he had let out his heart to somebody, the consequences had been…brutal.

She looked at him for a moment, and they kept on walking. The wind was cold, but his ears did not need protection. They felt hot.

“Do not get me wrong, but I am not ready for a relationship right now.”

“Yeah I get it. I heard that you had a past…which, I am not going to ask about right now”. He quickly added as he saw a shadow appearing on her face.

He took a deep breath, and continued, staring into the distance. “I know you don’t like me the way I do. And I accept that. There is no need to.”

“Although I have never been in one, I realise how difficult getting into a relationship can be. Getting intimate with somebody, letting them into your extreme personal space, effectively letting your lives intersect completely, with a complete stranger…this is extremely daunting. And this kind of scares me as well, for I have done an unimaginable amount of shit in my life which I am too embarrassed and scared to let new people know about.”

“But there is a caveat. It is scary only when you let in a complete stranger into your life. Not when it is a dear friend, a friend you can trust, a trust built over days of communication and fun.” He looked at her briefly, and proceeded to stare at the lapwing jumping near the footpath.

“Please dont get me wrong. I am not saying that it is no longer daunting to let that friend in. What if they leave? What if they judge me? What if they stop caring anymore? In this post-modernist world, these kind of things are quite common. However…” He now proceeded to look at her. She was looking at the road, facing away from him. “That means that friend never understood me in the first place.”

“See that is the purpose of these…outings, if you will…which I want to have with you. I want to know you better. I want to know the person behind the face which looks cute even when she is stressed, the soul which drives that very same woman to dance with even a high fever and still win the competition, and the heart…” He paused for a while, “that captivated the heart of another person who almost stopped believing in falling in love and made him love again”.

“I am not asking you to reciprocate right now. No. I know it is not possible for you to do it at the moment at least. I just want to know you properly, as a friend, and then see where it leads to. And for me, that is more than enough. I feel happy just by having you accompany me in these trips, by being a friend who you can trust.”

She briefly looked at him again, her face a bit red, and both of them looked towards the road again as they continued walking. Their ice creams had begun to melt.

Hypothetical conversations in the mind of an overthinking philosopher

Pic credits: My friend Soumyajit Chattoraj

Welcome to Musings!

2023-05-17 00:00:00 +0000

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