In order to feed my constantly overthinking and daydreaming mind, I fed it with the thought of life and the labyrinth (one of the consequences of reading too many literature classics, you could say!). I am not a huge fan of mazes or even maze puzzles and never really wondered why. But I, sure am intrigued when it comes to the labyrinth of life. Because all my life I have always had a plan mostly like a 5-year plan and I haven't gone anywhere without an itinerary. Being spontaneous or impulsive is something that scares me to life. As much as I believe in destiny, it is not really easy for me to leave everything to nature's plan and "go with the flow". As much as I have heard "be water" I could not be because I am hard as ice when it comes to change and spontaneity. But if at all I have learned in my 20s it is that, no matter how much we plan to escape the labyrinth of life, it finds us and makes sure we pass through it.
As much as I have planned, life hardly went the way I wanted it to be, some broke me and some made me but what stands with me till today is the fact that 'life only gives you what you can handle and sometimes, irrespective of whether we understand certain things in that exact moment it's happening, the moments and the lessons we learn along the path of this beautifully scary maze makes the most of this life. For me, it took a really long time to come to terms with this labyrinth because I was so cautious about avoiding it as if it is something bad or something that ruins the beauty of the life I have planned for myself.
When I found myself in the labyrinth (when I wrote one of my previous blogs - Luminal space), to my surprise I found that I am more flexible than I thought I had been and that I am not as sad as I thought I would be for not having something I thought I will have at that given moment. I understood what content really means and how it has got very little to do with the things we have. As much as this maze confuses me because at times I feel like I have explored every path that there is, only to realize there is always more and that there is no one destination.
Recently, I saw the Netflix movie "Look both ways" and it was as if the universe's way of telling me to dig more into the 'labyrinth of life' because the protagonist in the movie goes out to explore two ways of life, only to find that either way she is happy, and content as much as she was sad and confused in both of them. I couldn't help but think, what if this maze called life works the same way? No matter the path we take, some are meant to be taken because it requires us to learn something new to come out as the person this life has intended us to be and some are meant to be taken to un-learn everything we have learned to go through this life as the person that we are meant to be. And some are meant to be taken to be lived in that exact moment, without giving it much thought.
Easier said than done, right? What about the people we meet in the maze? We don't just meet them, do we? We love them, we hate them and some we want to run together with and some, run away from. But maybe we meet these people because whether it is a maze or life, no path gives more meaning when traveling alone. As social animals, it is innate that we crave each other. But just because you have crossed some of the hardest paths with me, will it be alright for me to want you to drop your search and join mine? I'm afraid not! This labyrinth is for us to explore, for us to understand. Even the love of my life could never really comprehend the nightmares I had to endure during this journey and neither can I when it comes to them. But understanding one's own journey will definitely give us the strength and compassion to see and understand what it takes to be on a maze that is constantly changing its course.
Knowing that, how can I ever hold on to hatred or grudge, or even jealousy? We have never been and never will be on the same path, so when our path crosses I will make sure that my kindness will accompany you. I have not been very kind to myself while I was figuring this puzzle out, so forgive me if I have not been kind to you. This applies to anyone and everyone who has known me, because like I haven't been kind to myself, you haven't been kind to yourself and that is why we both bled when we met. Amidst untangling this beautiful maze, I understand what it means to have a ground that is helping me stand still, my family and friends. Even when lost, you are my guiding light.
The labyrinth is teaching me to question the bits of driven, linear, achievement-based dysfunction that can make me miserable in a life of incredible blessings and good fortune. We didn’t enter life to get it done. There is no place not worth revisiting. We double back to find the pieces of ourselves that still clutch the same issues like a baby clutching its pacifier. Compassion invited us to this unbearably repetitive, slow, complex path of self-discovery, to show us that only when we surrender our idea of how things should be going do we notice that the entire thing is breathtakingly beautiful.
