Things that matter……..

Sukhad Anand
4 min readOct 14, 2020

We live our life just once touching souls, creating memories and legacies. Each one of us is driven by million of forces governing the actions that we perform in our life. Each force governed by an emotion. Observing this world I found out these emotions actually end up to be the things that actually matter to each one of us. Looking deep into myself I decided to pen down all of these forces down to create an equilibrium called inner peace.

Life runs smoothly when things that matter are in harmony with each other. But what do we do when they diverge. What do we do now? Life for me till now has been a dilemmatic journey. A journey where I had to make a lot of choices. As I grew the decisions that had to be made became tougher.

From the day we are born, we are given examples of great people who did some great things for this world that totally changed the perspective and the quality of life we have today. One question I always wonder is that nobody talked about their personal life, and by personal life I mean each minute details like : the time they spent with their friends, their lifestyle, their daily routine, their leisure time activities, their love life, their family life and the list goes on…

The society though taught me to look up-to them and become like them but no one told me how to. So wandering like everyone I carried on my path to becoming like my idols driven by one single aim to do something big. Now at just few steps far from the starting point, I discover these dilemmas which I can’t get over.

In a quest to become like them I found out that I would have to devote a lot of time almost all of my time to follow my passion or dreams. And on the way to this, I realised I stopped giving time to the people who laid my foundation, my parents, friends and teachers. I feel a lot of love for them but I cannot reciprocate what everyone did for me.

I felt disappointed with myself for not being able to reciprocate the amount of efforts they did for me. But the story isn’t that easy. Disappointed and lost, I look around, and find out that the world is full of sadness, filled with problems like unequal distribution of resources, oppression of rich over the poor, the ignorant society, rogue men and nations trying to disrupt peace. A vicious circle of greed destroying each and every aspect of this beautiful life.

I feel helpless for not being able to eliminate sadness of the people around, stand up in the society for the things that are wrong.I feel thankful to how fortunate I have been to be able to even have these thoughts to make some changes. So I make a decision to work like hell to get the amount of power that could drive away all the sadness around.But wait I forgot something…..(the disappointment of un reciprocation)

Now I have two things on my plate each equally important and demanding. But I don’t know how to deal with this. So I go back to find out answers from the people who inspired me, to find out how they dealt with their personal life and their dreams simultaneously.

This is what I found out. All the successful people that you have ever heard had very different personal lives. I read the biography of Steve Jobs, to find out he went on to become a loner in search of spiritual enlightenment at the Himalayas, losing all of his relationships and finally ending up as a great personality. So should I go to hills now??I don’t think so. I needed to find some other story.

Next came Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, whom we all admire. Even he didn’t have a great personal life. He lived his life alone in his apartment full of his great thoughts. He didn’t have a fancy life. He never even owned a television. So can I do this now?? I don’t think so.

So leaving these old school super heroes I decided to read about Tony Stark of our generation, Mr Elon Musk. Got to find out he went through three unsuccessful marriages, all of them broke due to just one single reason which was, he kept his dreams and responsibilities towards society above all.

So what are all these stories pointing at, all of these successful men that we admire actually sacrificed their personal lives, to become what they are today.

I found out my whole childhood was a scam. We look up to great people to become like them, following our passion, but are we ready to pay the price what they paid? Even if we are, would the people surrounding us, who actually matter to us, will sacrifice us to see us becoming a great personality ????

Whom to give more importance to?? At which part should we spend our most time: on people who have made efforts to bring us here, have always stood as support pillars to give us the strength to make us what we are today or on the people who have been living in darkness, far away from the comforts of life that we enjoy.

Oscillating like a pendulum between these two major things which matter to me I found out resonance can’t be achieved until I make a choice. If you are reading all this till here and relating too and trying to find out an answer in this post. I am sorry guys I don’t have an answer to this.

I am just a simple teenage boy trying to eliminate all the reasons of his sadness and solving this puzzle of things that matter……

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Sukhad Anand

Addicted to 007 movies and music of all genres and all generations. A bit of philosophy with a pinch of music and a handful of coding.