In appreciation of Grey

All my life, I have been an extreme person and I have been extremely proud of it. It was either Black or white . It was either all or nothing. It was either excess or zilch. So if I was into someone, I was really into them. If I hated someone, I really hated them too. If I studied hard, I topped the class, if I wasnt up to it I came in last. If I train, I train as if I am going to compete in the Olympics, if I dont, I become a couch potato. You get the drift..

I can safely say that I am a very passionate person and this passion rubs on to all areas of my life and not just love. I don't pursue anything that I am not passionate about or that I cannot be passionate about. My passion for things that I love or care for makes me extreme in my pursuit of them. I will go all out, leave no stone unturned, make no excuses for bad performance, will redo it until I get it right, move mountains, part oceans if I want something really bad and nothing can stop me. Thats the way I was raised. I was raised to be the best and nothing but the best.

In the past decade, I have noticed a pattern in my life. I have always reached a point in human relationships, or in my career, or spiritually where I needed to ask the " All or Nothing" question. And all of those times, I walked away with nothing to show for my total and complete devotion and loyalty to the individuals who now are doing exactly the same things I had expected out of them for other people. Makes me feel a little cheated as I was there in their tough times and now when its all good for them, they have conveniently made me a forgotten grey area. It was ok for me earlier to walk away empty-handed and start from scratch again, but as the years go by, I am feeling jaded about the fact that I have just Nothing to show for most of my life and the reason behind that was my ideology of being extreme.

It doesn't surprise me that I find myself more and more on unfamiliar grey territory inspite of the fact that I detest it. The undefined, the vague, the in-between, and not-so-sure zone and I find myself drowning. I find myself questioning my belief system. What if grey was good? What if something is really better than nothing? What if everything I believed in or wanted in life was just a mirage?

When we were younger, we are brimming with ideals and values and we all want to live life the right way and do the right things. But then we face life with all our innocence and we go through situations that pollutes our pure and spotless mind. We get hurt. We build walls around us so that nobody can hurt the true person hiding behind the wall and yet we wish that somebody could read us like a book and somebody could climb those very walls we built to protect ourselves to save us from our loneliness. We did the right thing inspite of the madness surrounding us and yet we got hurt. We look around us and we see the other people who have happy smiles inspite of the fact that they have not done the right thing. And then we question ourselves, is it really worth it to do the right thing and be unhappy or is it wiser to embrace grey and be happy in our life? If doing the right thing just makes us come last, why not get rid of our conscience and get ahead in this race of life? Why should we care about what is right or what is wrong when we were never rewarded for our good behaviour? Why should we be virtuous when that virtue makes us finish last. We have all been here. We have all been tormented by this battle going on in our head. We are all justified when the good in us wants to be bad because we never got anything to show for our goodness and virtue. And if we did choose to change what we believe in, nobody can point a finger to us because they have walked in our shoes. Its all justified, consciences get managed into believing that to survive this life we needed to evolve and certain ideals need to be let go as they dont make sense anymore. We do what feels right for us at the moment and we seek happiness for the moment one day at a time and there is nothing wrong with that.

I find myself at this point in my life where I don't want to have nothing all the time because I know I deserve more than that. I want more. And this time, I want more of all and not nothing. So should I change who I am? Should I embrace the grey way of life? Or should I just be who I am and do my thing and be my own person and follow my beliefs till the very end and live life on my terms and be optimistic that good things happen to good people no matter what.