Lost essence of Life

Through out life we face many ups and downs, we start accepting and rejecting certain things about ourself and about people around us. Knowingly or unknowingly, opinions and judgements become common part of our daily routine. While we are focusing so much on achieving something in life and the different kind of struggles we are facing we start losing parts of our life stages. Just like many people out there I also belonged to a middle class family. I wasn’t born with a golden spoon in my mouth either, I also had to struggle for my achievements like majority of the people out there. But for me, more than financially it was the mental and physical struggle. It was fighting with a man made system which had different rules for girls and different for boys, YES!, this is while living in the UK. The culture, society never changed for some.

Depression is a big reality of our life, which people till date try to avoid because they are scared to be stigmatised. It makes it even harder for people to fight depression, when people they consider to be close to them like family, friends are being ignorant. People going through depression need no judgements. They only need listening to, someone who could just hear them out even if you don’t understand.

When we’re going through rough times – health problems, relationship problems, financial problems, we make judgements and decisions in order to rectify the situations to the best of our abilities. You are the one who can decide what is important for you, and what your actual needs are to live a happy life. But the more we try to control life according to our plans and desires, the more we are likely to create a living hell for ourselves . Many believe in sacrificing for others, but ask yourself, is sacrificing for others the only reason for you to be in this world?

There are still many out there who believe that happiness is far more important than anything in the world and any kind of little things/activities can make them happy. Maybe we can’t be thankful for the many losses of opportunity that we have suffered, but we can be thankful for the opportunities that have opened up: to read, to learn, to engage in meaningful conversation with others, to cook food, to be financially secure, to write poetry, to have a small home but with happy people.  The opportunity to quietly reflect on our lives, how we have lived, and how this crisis can help us see how we wish to live when it’s over. There is a very famous verse from the Quran, which summarises everything.

So.. which of the favours of your LORD would you deny?

Some of the main factors in life, which we look at when analysing our lives are such as Relationship, Family, Finance, Career
Spirituality. We may be struggling with an illness, Financial difficulties, unemployment or the death of a loved one, or something as simple as wrong clothes size being delivered.  At such times we are often aware of our pain and our attention is drawn to our grief, our disappointment. Each factor has its own importance for people and defines the life accordingly for them but we need to learn how to navigate and transform ourselves rather than changing the world. We forget while our attention is diverted, there is a lot positive happening, try to count your blessings and see how often we fail to see the many ways life is still caring for us.