Wednesday, March 02, 2011

metamorphosis

as he sat reading his friend's friend's poem , he realized the acute sense of disconnect he felt similarly long time back. he had grown, grown out of these teenager days and those teenager ideals. those ideals were passionate, were something he stood for, lived by and could have never believed it would be so trampled upon that now it didnt matter at all to him.
rewinding he went back to those days of carefree days of his undergrad. times when the mind was looking for a cause, for a passion, for a reason to believe in something that he could put his energy to. days were spent reading those ayn rand books, george orwell, books that had strong opinions about issues that were relevant to living life. time when we were searching for what exactly to do with life, grappling with emerging contradictions, feeling around to take the next logical step. it was in those days that the strong ideals would be shaped which differed as per the personality of each person. there were discussions, debates about raging issues which then seemed the most important to take a stand on. to have an opinion about.
one of those ideals that everyone espoused was for friendship, friendship no matter what happened. spending those days together made it stronger from the roots, so entwined that one could hardly think about not spending life with each other. laughter, jokes, movies, studies everything was done ... a great deal of time spent in other's company.
and soon there would come a time when everything would unravel. when one would realize friendship is not as immortal as it is made out to be. nor is it possible for it to be perfect, that pristine pure human feeling incapable of being soiled by anyone's actions. but life has its own way of dealing us with lessons. we were dealt with harshly when we would wake up to the realities of life. reality of survival, reality of measuring upto our own lofty standards of achievement .. standards of living life the way we wanted to. however we didnt realize when we formed that ideal of friendship we also formed ideals of achievement , where one might have just destroyed the other. it was impossible for both to co-exist even in a very crippling fashion. and as we came out of that institution the ideals in conflict led us to places we might have dreamt of before in the process sacrificing other ideals.
we changed, adapted and soon outgrew those silly passionate ideals that we were so vocal about. it didnt matter anymore in the face of new challenges .. the emergance of the next phase , a metamorphosis.