Letting go

I cannot be held responsible if you automatically think of the peculiar adhesiveness of people in power and their respective posts, the moment I say 'Letting go'. Yes, you guessed it right, I AM going to talk of the difficulty of 'Letting go' but WHY that should automatically lead you to think of people who bemoan the abolishing of crowns, I do not know.

Yes! Yes! I, too, find it difficult to let go. Especially, when I am engaging in conversation ('Oh! You call your monologues conversation?" you mutter. I heard you!) with someone. Short of holding the person by his button, I do everything to keep him around. So would you, if, like me, you are faced with fast disappearing backs every time and have been lucky enough to snag one unlucky victim. But THAT is not exactly the 'letting go' that I intend talking of, either.

AND then there was the time when I mentioned this in a post

So, every time I approached a girl, this is precisely how I felt and, when I opened my mouth to talk and only managed to mewl, the lady of the moment fastidiously wrinkled her nose and moved away, assuming that I was about to barf. Needless to say, this did put a minor spanner in the works and, in retrospect, I find much reason to feel grateful that there was no Valentine's day in my days for me to be outside looking in forlornly at all those "Couples Only" places.

If I have given the impression that I am the strong, silent lover or, more likely, the mutt who comes running to fetch and carry when his idol crooked her finger and played the uncle, who became a horse or elephant as per choice, to her kids, I must admit such could have been the case but for a chance biological discovery. I found that the heart, being a muscle and not a bone, does not actually break and, thus, after a suitable interval, I always found another girl to mewl at.

A lady comments something sarcastic on Facebook, which seemed to say that, because I had not grown an unkempt beard, taken to drink and died of a broken liver (Yeah! Well! Hindi seems to associate emotions with the liver more than the heart - jigri dost, jigar ka tukda and all that), I was a mere butterfly flitting from flower to flower. So, even if the girl rejects you as something unfit for human company, she will still not let go of you apparently; you have to be a satellite revolving around her, with or without the help of liquor.

I also hear that parents find it difficult to let go of their children. First they find it rather tough to let go of the idea that their children can have opinions different from their own; then they find it tough to see them flit out of the nest and make a career elsewhere; and then they find it difficult that they have ceased to be the center of the universe for them. It is almost as bad for them as for the Sun to find that the Earth has decided to take up domicile in another star system. I do not even speak of those parents who think that their children have been sent down on Earth for the explicit purpose of fulfilling the dreams that they themselves failed to achieve, which goes to show HOW difficult we also find to let go of our dreams even when it is long after their expiry date.

THAT, though, is ALL hearsay for me. What I can vouch for is the difficulty in letting go of a job. Suddenly, you find yourself bereft of an answer to the question, "What do you do?" It is not exactly like I am Rip Van Winkle who does totally nothing (though I aspire to be) but apparently brushing my teeth, drinking coffee, reading books, watching a movie or even blogging are not answers to THAT question. If I give them those answers, I get a "Hahaha! But what do you REALLY do?" as though I had been regaling them with a fictitious account all along. I mean "I am retired" or "I retired as..." says nothing about what you are currently doing but those, apparently, are acceptable answers - provided you are old enough.

The worst case of not letting go of your office is when you keep visiting it after retirement, much like the tongue keeps visiting the vacant spot of a drawn tooth. THAT can be very traumatic, you know. Just as you are trying to digest the fact that your fond hopes - that your absence has caused your organisation to collapse - are misplaced, someone comes in and says, "You know, we were all pretty astonished that your absence could make such a huge difference. Efficiency almost doubled!" THEN, indeed, you are forced to let go!

To let go of what we have all accustomed ourselves to consider social obligations is probably tougher by far. In your doddering seventies, you still think that YOU have to go to the help of your sick child - even when all he is sick with is the flu - and even when the said sick child probably has children, who are gainfully employed and quite capable of taking care of it (AND screaming about the addition of a golden oldie to the 'take care' list? Sometimes, that too!). There comes a time when you need to face up to the fact that your social obligations are also at an end and it is about time for you to allow people to fend for themselves or seek such help as can be received from other more nimble people around. But, would you? No way!

You learn to let go of almost all of these; and, if you do not, the thing that you are grasping so possessively just yanks itself out of your grip and moves on. There is one thing, though, that ONLY death can possibly make you let go - THOSE opinions that you form without ANY reason for forming them. THAT is the friend which will NEVER leave you as long as you grasp it tightly.

Strange, isn't it, that the one thing that you need to be letting go of is the one thing that is so easy to hold on to? C'est la vie!