Tulyata

If you’ve read my other posts, you know I’ve had a mental health journey. I desperately want to hit a milestone that will say that I’m safe from the deep, deep lows that I’ve hit in the past, but I know I’m not quite there yet. In fact, I don’t know if such a milestone even exists. The one thing I feel like I can bank on is building those mental muscles and wiring my brain to pull out the tools I need to navigate the choppy waters and rip tides, and use them at the right time.

One of the things that helps me keep going is the sense that I will grow out of this phase, and I will come out stronger than before. This I know not from subscribing to a belief system, but rather from my own life experiences of the past 5-10 years. The important thing is to keep going. When it comes to life, the most important thing to do is to keep going. If we are on the right path, the milestones or even destinations will arrive and we will celebrate. If we are not on the right path, we will hit deadends, retrace our steps and course-correct.

There is no way to guarantee that there will be no roadblocks along the way. Sometimes, we are presented with challenges that we don’t have the option to turn down. There could be a health emergency, a situation where we might become care givers, a moonshot at economic growth, a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity, the list is endless. When we start on these difficult paths, the only thing that can help is to throw ourselves into scaling those peaks and to emerge victorious.

If this is how life flows, then maybe the right thing to do is to build an attitude that takes how life works into account. To expect to be surprised, but also, to know that we are not given more than we can handle. Life doesn’t end with death so why should death be considered the end of the road, or even a dead end?

Maybe, the only attitude that accounts for our understanding of life is to know that we need to constantly grow. If we carry that one principle with us, if it becomes engraved in our minds and hearts, not because someone said it, but because our assessment of our own lives and those whose lives’ circumstances we are privy to teaches us that it is so, maybe life will become easier to understand and appreciate.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that the odds are stacked in our favour. Life works in a way that helps us go from strength to strength, to keep learning, to love wholeheartedly, to fight for what matters to us and to keep growing, always. That is why, I’m choosing to build my attitude towards my life, my world and the universe to always say, growth first.