One Step at a time

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, a notion that I have embraced and ingrained in my psyche through the discourse of years. Life has its own ways of teaching you its lessons of joy, contempt, hatred, distress, love and healing. We dance, we stumble, we cry, we mourn and we get up. In the hours of plight we hold on to the tiniest peonies of hope, to get on the other side of life, to face the light, to face radiance that our soul craves and to be the best version of us that we have ever been. The healed version of us, the version of us that loves what they do and have faith in how far they can go and hold immense pride in how far they have come.

The most massive lesson that I have learnt in life is no one has a right to judge you for how you choose to lead your life, because at the end of the day only you know how much you have suffered to get to where you are now. No one knows the silent battles we go through, the tears we shed, the war we endure to find the peace that feels like a pond of water that satiates the thirst of our parched souls drenched in the aftermath of the trials we go through, the suffering that is destined for us to be the best, to be the hope we so desperately yearn and pray for.

Time is the best healer, it saves you and it savours you, it indulges you and yet it insinuates you into the person you are meant to become. It transforms you into the individual that your destiny has fated upon you, to fulfil the purpose you meant to be served. I wish we as humans could fathom our insignificance inI am heaven and I am haven, I am paradise and I am hell, I am beauty and I am the beast, I am all and yet I am none, I am human and yet I am no one. the impermanence of time and yet hold on to the significance we behold as unique individuals, attempting to fathom our reality and forging our unique existential being as we stride on this gift called life. The journey we walk on, the truth be told whether we survive or thrive, have it in abundance or live in deficit, live it through with joy or wallow through it in our pity, it all lies in our hands. As haunting as the realization is, it is also incredibly freeing to know that all that we want we can have, only if we believe that we are worthy of it all. The desires we yearn for, the lifestyle we want to live, it all starts in our mind.

I understand why we as individuals falter to believe we are worthy or capable of everything we yearn for. For the abundance, for the life we want, it is because we are conditioned to play ourselves small, to shrink ourselves to be digestible, to be reckoned and predictable to the world around us, to conform to what society has laid for us and follow what is deemed out of us. It is uncomfortable and unacceptable for people to see the ones who grew up in the same environment and situations as they grow into the ones they want to be. Because when you work on your dreams and become the one you yearn for from the same dwelling and they don't, the only thing they can do is blame themselves. Rather than questioning the root of their sense of jealousy and insecurity, they project their hatred and unfulfillment on you. But you have to remember it is not on you, it is on them. Whenever they wish you hell or say something bad about you, I hope you don't engage with them and wish them healing

I feel gratitude for the moments of hope and growth that I have experienced this year. From being a fresh marketing graduate to mentoring as a branding and marketing mentor at one of the biggest universities in India- Indira Gandhi University of Technology, the insights that I have gained and the experiences that I garnered in my stride are invaluable. I would extend my heartfelt gratitude to @Niravana Design Club for the opportunity and to all the appreciation and feedback received from my mentees. I hope this post reminds you to celebrate yourself through it all, through the darkness and the plight, through the radiance and the light, through thick and thin and through the beauty of hope that keeps our reckoned breaths in the face mortality akin.

-Hridya Sharma