Musings – mummum

In the past couple of days, I’ve had multiple interesting conversations with various people who contribute heavily to my thought process on a regular basis. Be it family or friends, present on earth or in heaven, each of them has a different opinion on some specific topics and yet each of them seem to make perfect sense. In my own little world, which is constantly full of chaos, each and every one of those opinions makes an impact, even if it is a very small one. On thinking for a moment, today I realised something. This goes to prove something that I have always argued against.

I have always believed that even though man is a social animal, man can build a world of his own and survive in that personal space alone. I remember, as a child, my mother would always try to teach me the importance of building an inner world of my own where I could find peace, feel free to be myself and be proud of myself away from the world that judges you, pushes you to do things that you don’t necessarily want to do or just simply disappoint you in terms of expectations. I may be wrong, but as a child, I interpreted that lesson as a key element of a plan to make myself resilient to the harshness that the world can sometimes throw at you. I interpreted this lesson as an indication that in order to be truly happy, you need to look within yourself and not at others. Only you can fulfil your expectations. Everyone else will, somewhere, sometime or the other disappoint you.

I turn 27 years old next week. In these 27 years, there are very few people who I can truly depend on. Partly due to my own fault and partly due to my thought process as I explained above, I have not entirely been successful in building my own world (I have managed a small part of it) because I haven’t been able to shut out the world in order to do so. Hence I realise that I can never totally eliminate the outside world to actually build an inner world of my own. My thoughts, preferences, choices, all tend to be influenced by what I see and hear around me. Arguments and debates have the power to sway my opinions one way or another. This is outside influence. If I hold on to my opinion claiming them to be my own, I don’t think I would be able to survive among my peers. They would just dismiss me saying I’m too staunch on every matter, because I do tend to have an opinion on just about everything on this planet. If I’m lucky enough, I even get away with some expressed opinions which otherwise would get me into a lot of trouble!

So does that mean my mother’s advice was wrong? It’s a no brainer. Mothers are almost never wrong! So that means mine wasn’t either. And even though I don’t have any way to clarify if she meant what I interpreted her lesson to be, I will always thank her for that lesson because it always helps me in someway or the other. I can spend hours alone if I have a couple of books around me, if I have my laptop (and internet of course!), also if I just have a paper and a pencil around. Granted that I have not been doing all this intentionally and that if I was a social butterfly, I would probably never have touched a book or written a single article ever! But being the kind of person I am, her advice always rings true to me and reassures me that I’m on the right path because I am following my mother’s lessons.

My mother always said that she was afraid that I was not mature for my age and that she was worried how I would turn out eventually. That would pretty much raise a war between us because I would argue how I was way above my peers in terms of the expected behaviours that my mother would describe for a kid my age. As I grew up, those wars stopped and I would just asked her what would make her believe that I was finally mature enough. Her answer never satisfied me. She would say that time and circumstances in life would show it. How I handle situations and make decisions would be a test of my upbringing and how mature I really was. That never really made sense to me. It still doesn’t and I doubt it ever will. Its a mother thing I believe! There were so many stories she would tell me, of her childhood, her elders who brought her up telling stories of their generations and so on. Sometimes I feel I don’t remember any of those anymore and that saddens me because I believe I’m forgetting her and that itself is alarmingly untoward. I would never want to forget all that she taught me and not act as she would want me to when a situation demanded something. But then a voice in my always tells me that I will always act as she taught me to. I am what I am because of what she always told me to do or not do.