Faith. Hope.

         

Life is often marked by a series of events that are either filled with joy or with sorrow. Chasms. But there comes a time in everyone’s life, when you are filled with doubts. Doubts about yourself. You question yourself, your intelligence, your capability, your ability to be a good friend n all of that. I’m pretty sure all of us have had our share of am-I-a-good-fit-for-this-job thoughts, am-I-making-a-blunder-by-dating-this-guy/girl, am-I-a-good-daughter/son moments etc. etc. And all of this happens, more often than not, because of the current affairs in one’s life. It is quite natural. No one is to blame. Some are event driven; some are because of over-thinking, some retrospection and some pure hallucination. :P

Although I haven’t even reached my quarter-life crisis, I seem to have experienced all of the above. Now, I don’t know if that’s because I have an extremely eventful life or it’s just that I am highly delusional. I hope it’s the former.

School, College, Grad/Med school puts you through plethora of emotions. Some good, some bad, and some ugly. Marks, ranks, grades, percentages, GPAs have made me question my potential. Secrets, backbiting, double-crossing, betrayals have made me question myself as a friend. Not meeting expectations sometimes have made me question myself as a daughter. There was always some quantifying factor that raised my doubt.

Questioning yourself for your own betterment is good; questioning yourself to the extent of losing your own confidence is unfortunate. As much as these small events can raise tremendous uncertainties, there are always other incidents that we fail to notice that restores our faith. Small gestures from a friend, who bakes you a cake for no reason, or makes your favorite dal on a not so favorite day, or sends you a text message after seeing some old photos, or just be there to listen to your nonsense. Little things to make your day better, like someone told me once that to see a lady bug is very lucky, and twice in my life I have seen a lady bug the day before an important event – both times everything worked out just fine for me. May be its true, may be not. But its just some faith, or may be some positive energy to make my day better. 

As much as anyone is sad during a downhill, suddenly things will fall into place and everything will workout, and we need to start building our faith from these little incidents. I myself don’t know clearly what I mean when I say “faith” or when I say, “build faith”- its ambiguous. Its just trust or confidence, may be in the powers of the universe :P, but its true and it happens to almost every other person. Some just turn a blind eye to it. That’s all!

Recent events in my life have lead me to believe that there is faith, if you want to have it. Martin Luther King Jr once rightly said, "Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase"

         

You say it best, when you say nothing at all...

There have always been a few words I thought I was incapable of understanding and some concepts I was unwilling to accept. One such example is “Silence”.

This writing of mine is a result of a lot of thinking and retrospection. Its funny how life has handed me a number of situations where remaining silent would’ve been the best thing to do; but such a thing did not exist in my dictionary and hence I always ended up making some noise. I always had to have the last word. 

“Silence is Golden” was absolute bullshit in my head. People who are extremely close to me will know this, oh yes I fight, if you are important and I have made place for you in my heart, and you did something to hurt me, I will fight with you. I will pull your hair out. But till today, I never thought of keeping quiet as an option.  For me, keeping quiet either meant, you have nothing to say to me, or you just accept you are at fault, which automatically meant you lost the fight.

My mathematics were, silence = defeat. Evidently, I was not mathematically sound :P 

There have been multiple occasions where my mom has told me, “Silence is the greatest source of Strength”. It was just like one of other few things she told me, “Go fold your bed-sheets”; or “Brush your teeth every night” or “Don’t eat junk”. I listened, no doubt. Never thought about it nor obeyed. But she was right. Experience is the teacher of all things.

When you get shot with a bullet right in your head, you die an instant death. You don’t feel the pain as much. It’s just too fast. It happens way too quickly.

But what is more painful is having a shot at a place where you are left to bleed to death. Every second of every minute you’d probably feel death is a lot easier.

Silence is that feeling. It kills you. It’s the best and the worst form of punishment.

When you fight with someone, and the other doesn’t reciprocate, nothing is worse than that. You want him to retort, you want him to give it back, you very badly want to provoke him; it kills you to know that he is keeping quiet after all that you have said. It just shows who's the bigger person, the one who decides to keep everything for after the volcano has cooled off. 

As a kid if I did something wrong or misbehaved, my dad would just stare at me or not talk to me. No noise. I know how that killed me inside. I’d rather have him scold and yell or even bring the roof top down, than not say a single word.

Silence is one the greatest arts of conversation. Silence is much louder than loud. Silence reverberates. That, my friend, is the power of silence.