When I was a kid, I read something in an article that one of my teachers gave me and it stuck in my mind. It’s one of those things that you learn as a kid and they stay with you for life. It said,

People come in to your life for a season, and for a reason.

It takes time and for many people even years to understand this simple, basic fact of life. That is why no matter how many friends you might have fallen apart with or how many break-ups you might have had, when the next one follows, you feel exactly like you felt when the first one happened – confused and frustrated. If we all knew and accepted this from the beginning, it will give the relationship, personal or business, a whole new perspective.

When some people leave you or it so happens that you have to leave them, instead of thinking “what went wrong”, it sometimes helps if you think, “what did I get to learn from this experience with him/her”. But it’s not always easy because it’s not always very obvious. Sometimes it requires you to dig deep in to your psyche, look at yourself from a different perspective, try to uncover things that lie deep within hidden because you’ve found no reason yet to pry them up. And it takes time. But if you are firm in your quest and patient with the results, you’ll have the epiphany you’re looking for.

I had mine before the sun set yesterday. The setting of the sun is such a symbolic event. It signifies that you must slow down, stop doing what you’ve been doing all day and decide to take some rest. With the rest comes the contemplation that is necessary to help you begin your day again when the sun will rise. The darkness that it causes hides everything that lies far in the horizon and lets you look at what’s up close, so you can focus. That is necessary because we look so much in to the future waiting for it anxiously that we fail to see what’s here already and fail to acknowledge it at times, let alone appreciate it. It’s easier for many of us, like myself, because it lets you feel like you can ignore all your vices today and hope for a better future. We think we can become better versions of ourselves if we leave all the bad things about us behind and become what the future wants us to. What we don’t realize is we can’t leave anything behind unless we actually accept and acknowledge that it exists. Good or bad, what’s in you is you and what you do is you. You can never run away from that. The only way to find peace with it is to acknowledge it, accept it and try to understand what needs to be done to better it.

I’ve been accused a million times for being selfish. And rightly so. I never denied being one but that should not mean that I took pride in it. Picking the best for myself always when I am sharing something with someone was my habit. I always needed to be taken care of first before I can take care of you. My needs need to be fulfilled first or else yours will go unacknowledged. I say this because it’s all true, even at the risk of making an understatement. But that does not mean I was a prick. I’ve been helpful to people around me and pretty generous at times. But deep down inside me, I knew the only thing that mattered to me was me. About a year ago, I made a phone call one evening to talk to someone desperately because I was feeling down. It happens to all of us at times when we just want someone to understand how we are feeling and give it some time and get over it. Doesn’t it? What I was told, however, didn’t seem to be of any help to me at that time. I was told the reason that I was sad for was because I paid too much attention to what I wanted. I gave too much importance to myself. And that I should forget about myself for some time and try to make others around me happy. And I thought I couldn’t do that unless I was happy myself first. I still can’t. It’s just easy logic. If I have what I want and I am happy, I’d want to make others around me happy as well because it would make sense to me. But if I am not happy myself, how can I focus on others? It just does not seem palpable.

Sigh.

I guess sometimes we have to understand that happiness is not everything that we live for and that there’s something greater than achieving that. It’s so hard to put others first when you know you might never get a chance for yourself if you let them have this. It takes a lot of strength to still let them have it. And it becomes a lot easier if you love them. I guess love is the answer then.

I know it is.