Become comfortable with this uncomfortableness.
Do we choose our ideologies?
We live them, so it feels like we do.
But did we ever choose them consciously?
In school, I was idealistic.
I respected unconditionally.
I was unapologetically patriotic.
Our story becomes our normality.
What we live becomes normal.
For a child who is well provided, comfort is normal.
For a child raised in abandonment, abandonment is normal.
Abuse, love, limitation, and success — all dissolve into the word normal.
We never question whether these conditions are natural or nurtured,
whether they were offered as absolutes or as options.
Our story becomes our truth.
Not good. Not bad. It simply is.
I did not even know there was such a thing as an antihero.
The world of corrupt thoughts was foreign to me.
I had passion. Desire.
Most of it was celebrated — drawing, painting, becoming an artist.
That passion was encouraged so fiercely it became my career.
But passion for bodies — men and women — stayed hidden.
Suppressed. Unspoken.
Until unrest arrived.
An itch.
***
We don’t have the option not to grow.
Not growing is not natural.
And growth never happens in security and stability.
Only death does.
No one wants to die.
I didn’t want to die inside.
Meeting lovers in secrecy and painting nudes in hiding
began to feel like a crime.
Anything done in hiding becomes a crime.
Anything done openly becomes paise — sacred.
Something in me stopped accepting what is called right,
what is called normal.
I wasn’t married.
I had no ethical chains on my sexuality.
Yet I was living like a criminal.
To live courageously, we need understanding that is not borrowed.
We want freedom without labels.
We want to witness our lives without moral subtitles.
We all want a slap strong enough to wake us from the sleepwalk.
***
When I left home after school,
I already sensed the shallowness of the system.
I didn’t go to college.
Not rebellion — instinct.
My belief collapsed.
My happiness was threatened.
A question entered and refused to leave:
What does it mean to live a meaningful life?
We need speed breakers in life —
not to punish us, but to wake us.
For some, it comes as death, loss, or catastrophe.
For me, it was subtle, but surgical.
An artist I worked with handed me a book by Osho.
Something about waves and the shore.
I didn’t understand the words,
but the book acted as an antidote.
It whispered a possibility —
that life can be lived differently,
that free will is not a slogan,
that sometimes we live not to prove ourselves,
but to disprove ourselves.
I stopped defending the old model.
I began searching.
And suddenly,
my sins started feeling sacred.
***
My core beliefs cracked.
My borrowed understanding of morals and ethics collapsed.
I started questioning everything.
Home became far-fetched for this rebel.
The closer I came to myself, the more I learned to live on my own —
calling wherever I was, wherever I am, home.
When our ideas are challenged not by intellectual debate
but by the raw experience of life,
a seed of growth is sown.
Contradiction is the symptom of growth.
We find the cracks in our own certainty and widen them.
This introspection reveals the vastness of man.
We expand so much that we become invisible.
The mind tries to comprehend this vastness.
It is unfathomable.
And in trying to grasp the infinite, the mind dissolves.
When we realise that our being is larger than life,
the mind and ego begin to fade.
A crisis leads to a silent revolution —
bigger than me, I, and us.
Something that changes our relationship with ourselves
and with the world we live in,
without making a sound.
Silent.
***
This is a real revolution.
This is a human Renaissance.
Awareness widens beyond the boundaries of the known.
We become aware of the unknown —
not to analyse it, because that is impossible,
but simply to be aware.
Without meaning.
Without purpose.
The more the outer layers of conditioning crack open,
the wider awareness spreads.
With fewer ideas about what life should be,
you become more yourself.
As the clouds of belief thin,
the world becomes clear.
An existential crisis may be a call for attention from the world,
but a conscious inner crisis
is the divine call for contentment.
The outer crisis has transitions, like the seasons.
The inner crisis has transcendence.
It is okay not to know how to be in this phase of life.
This is the time to improvise.
To experiment.
To leave the harbour
and let the ship finally do
what it was built to do.
Explore.
***
Something we have been anchored in all our lives
has to be left behind.
If you want to grow,
you cannot remain in the same shape, in the same phase.
To grow, you must change
your identity, your personality,
everything you think represents you.
Whatever is truly yours will return,
but only after you let it go.
Old identities dissipate
when the security of being someone dies.
Life moves when stability disappears.
We no longer know how to be who we were.
We stop becoming and start happening.
Dress unusually.
Write something abstract.
Try not to make sense of everything —
it keeps you busy without a reason.
This is how we evolve at every horizon.
We make peace with the new reality.
We keep changing with everything that changes.
***
We do not return to life
as a break from daily living.
We attend life.
We become life.
We stop following guidebooks.
We improvise.
We stop trying to make sense of everything
and start living inside change.
This is the return to innocence —
living curiously, serendipitously.
Our story is our normality.
Not good. Not bad. It simply is.
But we can be detached from it.
We can live without the past predicting the future.
***
A paradigm shift occurs
when you cast out the old and embrace the new —
constantly, increasingly.
And to do this without exhaustion
is to accept change without resistance,
to surrender to what unfolds.
Maturity is knowing
that only action is in your hands, not the outcome.
Do according to free will.
Let things happen in their own accord.
You Are Here — Again
We accept that only action is ours, not the outcome.
We throw the stone —
but we don’t throw ourselves with it.
Growth is no longer a crisis.
It is nature.
Become comfortable with this uncomfortableness.