INSIDE ME

It has been a while since I have penned down something. Deep thoughts ponder my mind and fight to be expressed, while I choose to suppress them.

It’s not every day that you get strange thoughts, when you look around and notice how things change with time. Change is the essence of life. But, if you look within, you will understand that your personality has undergone significant changes during the course of your life. Every action that occurs in the environment around us, every experience you accumulate living life contributes significantly to one’s behavior.

Let me start from the day when a life begins. A baby by birth has no built-in personality. As one grows up, he observes things and people around and learns to imitate and experiment. So, observation and experimentation are the two basic ways by which, one gains knowledge and gradually builds up his own style. Majority of one’s characters are either copied directly or adopted with slight modification. It’s not a mere co-incidence that most of your characters in the initial years of your life will resemble your parents. Then, at a later stage, your friends, then your spouse and the list of influencers goes on.

A small experiment will help you understand the fact. Just take a sheet of paper and try to list down your own characters. For example, if I consider myself, I can easily relate my honesty, straight-talk and laziness to my dad, my fear, shyness and indecisiveness to my mother. These are the traits that were induced at a very young age and still persist. While, there are some acquired traits like sarcasm, which was not there with me a few years ago. This leads me to conclude that “A person is always what he wants to be and not what he was when born”.  Every day, one has to make choices. A choice to either be good or bad is your own. Hence, the choices one has made till date is solely responsible for what he is today and no one else is responsible for it.

Happiness, in my opinion, is the most essential requirement for one’s existence. I would like to place a question in front of you all, which I have failed to find a satisfactory answer. Just ask yourself a question “Am I happy?” A lot depends on the answer to the above question. Majority of them just say ‘yes’ and a very less percentage of people actually are. When you are thinking about the answer to the above question, another question will certainly arise in your mind “What is happiness? “ It’s a very difficult question to answer. However, I would like to give it a try.

Most of you might feel that happiness is a state obtained by achieving what one wants. Well, though partially true, a lot depends on the nature of one’s wants. Any desire which is self centered will only bring you temporary state of happiness. A simple example would make things clear.

Let me consider the campus activity that happened in our college. Suppose a person gets a T1 placement, his friend, no matter however close he is, will get jealous. Jealousy is a very normal trait that everyone has acquired. Now if the same guy’s friend gets a better job, the older one will get jealous. So, overcoming jealousy seems to be the only way to achieve happiness.

Well, I think it’s too much for tonight. I wonder if I wrote this. “Profound thoughts and thoughtless actions” – probably I have learnt to define myself.

Signing off,

Praveen S.