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The Small Window - A short story written by Doreen Soans, edited by Anika and Anu Mehta, photographs by Arjun Mehta.
He lazily walked into my green lush garden stared at my
broken window for many hours. I briskly walked up to him in anger and slapped
him before commanding him to get out of my life. My ex had stayed tuned in to everything I had said and had lived
up to the expectations set by every romantic song in every language possible. I
discovered that despite this I couldn’t get myself to feel anything other than
numbness for him.
“Love is the
hardest thing to understand and yet we all want to experience it, feel it and
be in it and sometimes fall out of it too.”
There are many shades of love. There are many who marry their
first love; there are some for whom every love is their first and then of
course there are some who feel their last love was the ONLY real thing.
Wonder what
comes in the way of love? Is it the past that never heals or the past that
never leaves or is it the past that sometimes comes in the way of the present
and or is it that reminiscing the past is the only hope for the future?
No matter who calls the shots in the relationship the discord
in relationships affects both the partners. One partner is always at the giving end and the other is
always at the receiving end. During difficult times in a relationship both
partners may soak themselves up in tears, and emotions and may be blinded to identifying
the real problem for their disharmony.
The question here is why can’t people move on from dead
decaying relationships.
Having attended
so many workshops on self-development I, understand today that fear, anger, sadness, guilt, and grief
are the feelings that people experience in relationships while dealing with difficult
situations. The intensity of each emotion they experience may vary according to
the stress they experience.
So let’s
understood what makes us hold on to our past and why do we in the secret
section of our heart and mind leave that small
window of hope open?
According
to me most of us living in the modern times have definitely experienced breakups
in relationships. Honestly the numbers of break up don’t matter, but the person
we loved and their memory that lingers on matters. It’s a small window of hope that is open for that one person
from the past; with whom we had dreamt of our future, the future that has not
materialized.
Many
emotions that we experienced during the breakup may still haunt us. Fear
experienced during the break up also may be held in our heart and mind.
Sometimes while dealing with fear we find ourselves secretly holding on to the
past and reassuring ourselves that all will work out. But for how long can we hold
on to our past? Is that little gap telling us something about our present? Do we fear that we are not good enough
to recreate that same magic, security and love that we had created before for ourselves?
Is that the reason good enough to stay back in a dying relationship?
Anger held
in the relationships may also be another reason to hold on to our past. Anger can
take us away from our loved ones. These are the people on whom we may have slammed
the door; too soon too fast without bothering to check what impression we left
behind and we may still harbor the hope of patching up with them, without
taking any appropriate actions to patch back the relationship, almost waiting
of the other to make the first move.
Sadness and
grief experienced during the emotional breakup can be transformed into positive
feelings, if we give ourselves permission to experience happiness, and love again.
We experience sadness and guilt because we blame our KARMA and ourselves of whatever has gone wrong in the relationship
taking undue credit that we have caused loneliness
and lifelessness in life for others. Rather than blaming the Karma and us we need take appropriate
actions to deal with the problem. We need to realize that everyone has the need
to be loved, cared for and experience happiness. So it is important to move out
of the feeling of self-pity, self-blame and move on and shut the window of our
past that is responsible for our unhappiness and sadness.
I’m not
sure why people advice others to remain silent about their past and present. I
speak honestly about my life. I have often pondered on why I had left the small
window of hope open. I today found the answer, I realized that my mind was
indulging and occupied with feeling of fear. My past felt like big soft pillow filled
with the lightest fabric and feathers and shutting that past window of love
meant that I would have had to experience the feeling of vulnerability.
I
understood that vulnerability was there because of shame and shame is a great
place of creation. We also need to understand that the relationship we share
with ourselves is mirror image of the relationship we share with others. So if
we feel angry inside then we are angry at the whole world. So if we can’t shut
that window of our past, then we need to reflect which feeling [Fear, Anger, Sadness, Guilt, and Greif] has
gripped us and has stopped us from shutting that window from our past, which is
causing so much of grief.
Only if we can
reassurance ourselves that we will always be able to create safety and security
needed by us, then we can shut the window of our past and walk ahead to experience
the magnificent ‘Us’ without the baggage and the weight from our past.
So it’s a choice, a choice to shut that
small window of the past and move ahead or, to leave that window open. These open
windows help us to study and analyze our past and thus, help us to evolve and
fix the things that we have overlooked in our past.
Written by
Doreen Soans, META-Health practitioner
Edited by
Anu Mehta, META-health Mater trainer
Photograph
by Arjun Mehta
