What's that made of us?
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Our society’s priorities are weird. It places more importance on ticking off the predetermined checkboxes (made by itself) at the earliest possible,than enjoy the state/phase of being you are at. It’s made these arbitrary timelines that determine birth, education, marriage, kids, and so on. It’s like Amazing Race on AXN and we are the participants who are supposed to rush from one stop to another. Got born? Now you run to learn how to read, learnt that? Now get a PhD. Got hit by puberty? Here’s your wedding dress. On your honeymoon? Make sure you are impregnated with quadruplets.
There’s no time to breathe in this scheme of things as they are. No time to enjoy childhood without worrying about whether your entrance coaching is enough to get you a medicine or engineering college seat. No time to travel when you are single and nurture your friendships, no time to seek that which makes you truly happy, no time to choose the person who will make you a better you, no time to fall in love completely with your other half, no time to breathe.
Our priorities are so distorted that instead of telling our teens to research about courses that work for them we tell them to do engineering/ medicine as a base degree and then decide what they want to do. Instead of helping/leaving space for our youngsters to find the partner they want, we tell them marry someone of our choice and learn to adjust. This word right here- adjust- is our problem. We are so scared of missing out on the next step or reaching the next milestone late that we ‘just adjust’: with a degree that makes us want to bang our head on the wall, with a partner that makes your ovaries go into depression, with a bad marriage that sucks the joy out of you, with child rearing responsibilities you weren’t ready for, with a job that you hate with all heart. We just adjust. We don’t wait and watch and choose what’s best for us. We accept what someone somewhere a few generations back thought was best for them.
What’s that made of us? A creation that despite having the ability to learn and grasp and think and analyze, is just a mass of cells that ‘adjusts’. My policy is to make decisions that require the least amount of ‘adjustments’ and leave the rest to God. Timelines are irrelevant when you have this whole wide world waiting to be explored. Alhamdulillah it’s working for me so far…
Nazreen Fazal
Writer, Wife, Mother, Indian, Muslim. So many labels, one me. I write, I rant, I ramble in order to make sense of everything happening around. Join me on this journey as I share snippets of my life, going about work, my parenting wins and fails, and the murky waters that's long distance marriage.
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