A nineteen year old guy walking down the streets of Connaught Place, with a bearded face, carrying a shoulder bag, holding a lollipop in one hand and laughing out loud in public with his besties. Can that person explain what maturity is? The guy having a mentality of 13 year old kid at the age of nineteen, will he actually be able to convey what maturity is all about? A person who every time shows up with a gentle rocking smile on his face might not have faced any hardships in life is what our foremost perception can be .
But the picture is not always what it looks like, what we perceive isn’t always the truth. Few people might consider that person to be childish or even stupid, but I look upto him as an inspiration, who likes to stay cheerful and happy all the time without any reason. According to him if you are happy for a reason you are not doing it right because your happiness ends when the reason goes away. Just like the grass is always greener on the other side and the second side of coin can never be seen, in a similar way there might have been many transient phases in the life of that individual that now he has trained himself to subjugate all that pain very well and accept life the way it is.
Or was it something else, was he actually happy? After having a long conversation with that individual, I realized just because he laughs a lot, doesn’t mean his life is easy. Just because he has a smile on his face, doesn’t mean something isn’t bothering him. Actually he chose not to dwell on the negatives, keeping head up and move on with his life. I came to know a lot more things, a lot of ideas about how to live freely, openly and whole-heartedly, what maturity is and most importantly how to stay happy and make others happy too. How to deal with the hardships in life and how to use the best two tools – cute smile and the meaningful silence in the most suitable ways.
Apologizing doesn’t always mean that you are wrong and the other person is right, it just means that you value your relationship more than your ego. That individual emphasized on the importance of a meaningful silence, which is better than loads of meaningless words. He emphasized on the need of staying quiet and dealing with the issues patiently rather than getting nervous and creating a mess out of them. Maturity lies in the fact of dealing crises/hardships with patience and having a full fledged plan to curb it instead of getting impatient and finally indulging into a deeper crises.
Maturity is when you accept people the way they are and when you understand that everyone is right in their own perspective, instead of trying to superimpose your opinion on them. When you are able to differentiate between ‘need’ and ‘wants’ and are able to let go off your wants, you can be called mature. Maturity is when you stop comparing yourself from others and when you stop trying to change others but rather focus on changing yourself. You are mature enough when you stop proving the world how intelligent you are, when you do not seek approval from others and when you are at peace with yourself.
While interacting with him, there was a point when he started discussing his personal life and came up with the instances that how having a good heart can put you in some fucked up situations or the really hard times. Presently, he strongly opposes being polite since according to him, being polite is so rare these days that it is often confused with flirting or being submissive. He also believed in the ideology that it is better to be arrogant with arrogant people , as accordingly this is the only language they respect, as they confound kindness with weakness. Apart from this the individual also compared human to an iron piece and stated that none can destroy iron, but its own rust can. Likewise none can destroy a person but his own mindset.
And then somehow in the middle of conversation came the topic of relationships, one of the most relevant topics in any teenager’s conversation. But here also he centered his focus on maturity and made a point that true maturity is when you are able to drop ‘expectations’ from a relationship and give it for the sake of giving and when you stop attaching yourself to the material things. At the same time, he made a statement that the parental love is incomparable and can never be ignored, with a gentle smile on his face.
The word ‘Love’, reminded him of the girl to whom he loved for 7+ years but couldn’t get her and as justification he said, “at some point you will realize that you have done so much for someone, that the next only possible step to do is to stop. Leave them alone. Walk away. It is not that you’re giving up and you shouldn’t try. It’s just that you have to draw a line between determination and desperation. What is truly yours, would eventually be yours and what is not, no matter how hard you try, will never be”.
By now, I was getting late and had to leave. I asked for his approval and at once he nodded, we shake hands and I told him 'it was nice meeting you, Mr.Stranger', to which he replied "there are no strangers, they are just friends who never met."
