How do you feel when people advise you?

There are three kinds of people in this world.

Firstly, there are those who hear the advising person uttering just one word. Bla.

Secondly, there are those who actually hear what the advising person is saying and feel that he is making a lot of sense.

Thirdly, there are those who hear an advice, ponder about it and finally make up their mind to change the stupid idiotic kind of lives they are living.

Now, here’s the catch. The third kind exists only in the imagination of the person who is advising. The second kind exists till the time their egos step in and turns them into the first kind, the kind that is able to hear only one word. Bla.

How easier it would be if we could feel the feelings of the other person? I mean, instead of having ears that hear only the word bla all the time, we should have had a provision that helped in knowing was a person actually feels towards you. Not that feeling doesn’t change or people don’t change, change is constant, but it would have helped in being sure whether it is worth to invest your time in someone?

If we had such a provision, to feel someone else’s feelings, we would behave in a certain way. We would be calculated in our approach, in our words, in sharing our thoughts with that person because we would know we are in sync with that person and if we did something this person doesn’t appreciate, he would feel bad. We would care about his feelings so much that we would wait for the appropriate moment to tell this person certain things instead of uttering anything anytime.

Nonsense is when someone says something but doesn’t mean it. It is when someone says something that doesn’t make sense. To me, there is only on explanation to this phenomenon. When someone does something that doesn’t make sense, it means that the person is not bothered about anyone’s feelings. It means that the person is just following his heart. But, heart is a tricky instrument to play with. It will make you believe that you are walking towards peace and before you know it, you will find yourself all alone, with no one with you but loneliness. Shouldn’t loneliness be a synonym for peace? Everything is so silent and peaceful when one is lonely. Nobody to talk to, no noise. Ah! What nonsense!

The other day I was made to read a story. A story about a man who is having an extramarital affair and is ready to leave his wife and son to be with the woman he currently loves. In that story, the man’s wife puts across a set of conditions and says that if the man follows the conditions for a month, she will happily divorce him. After a month, the man realizes that he doesn’t love the woman he is currently in love with, but that he loves his wife! He realizes that all he lacked in is marriage was intimacy and personal effort to make things right. The person who made me read this story is a very special person to a very special person for me.

To think of it, those are the very special persons only who have all the right to advise someone about their lives. The blame for advising shall never be put on the advising person but on the person who made them feel that they can advise. When all you ever hear from an advising person is ‘bla’, how can you give power to someone to advise you? And if you are not able to hear anything except ‘bla’, why do you even ask for an advice?

In my case, I didn’t ask for advice, but the problem with the grownups is that they are too rightful in everything they do. Just because they have spent 15-16 years more than you in the world doesn’t mean they know everything about life. They don’t know what to do if their partner regularly tries to commit suicide in a foreign country. They don’t know what to do when their mother-in-law is furious about them financially helping their parents. They don’t know what to do when they’re told to believe in things they don’t believe in. They don’t know what to do when their wife is sharing all their secrets with her mother. They don’t know what to do if their father steals all their investment and blame their mother for it. They don’t know what to do when they find out that their diary is burnt because someone doesn’t want them to write. They don’t know what to do when their brother wastes a golden opportunity they provided him to have a much better life than he is currently living. They don’t know what to do when all everybody cares about is their next paycheck. They don’t know what to do when they have to give up a promising career because their wife doesn’t want to live in a joint family. They don’t know what to do when nobody cares about them. The thing is, I didn’t know either.

I didn’t know what to do in all these situations until I met someone who said something that didn’t sound like ‘bla’. This person said exactly what I was continuously ignoring in order to, somehow, put everything in place and make everything work. I was trying so hard that I didn’t notice how everything that was happening around me was affecting me. Unbelievably, I was ignoring a hell lot of things.

I was ignoring that I was in the worst shape of my life. I weighed 44 kilos at that time. I couldn’t eat anything. My appetite was at its worst. I was suffering from continuous migraine attacks. I was trying so hard to keep everyone happy that I didn’t care about my happiness. My dream of becoming a writer and share my stories with the world was just a dream from the last six years. No matter how much I earned, I couldn’t save a penny for myself.

When I met this person, she told me the truth and that too very bluntly. He told me that I was not taking things easy, that I was in a constant rush to improve things. It was like a cage being lifted off, the walls being brought down and setting me free to follow my heart. She put no conditions on me. She let me be what I wanted to be and slowly, in time, I began to find a self which was lost somewhere. I realized that all I ever needed was to be what I always was, unique. I didn’t have to try and fit into the society because I never believed in the idea of society in the first place. I had to have guts to say what was in my mind. Once I began to say what I wanted to say, I began to piss of people. Hundreds of friends left me because I was following my heart. I began to say what I wanted to say. I began to write what I wanted to write and eventually, I began to get what I wanted to get. The dreams were not dreams anymore. It was like rebirth. I felt like a kid who was amazed by looking at everything around him. It was like lifting off of a veil. I stopped seeing people and I began to see stories. Hundreds and thousands of stories every day. It was so much inspiration that I began to overflow. All because of this one person who let me be what I had to be. She restarted me.

I know reading all this is going to make no difference to you. May be the only word you will ever read between these lines is ‘bla’.

Trust me, that is exactly what I hear when someone advices me to do something that I don’t want to do. Bla.