Being "indifferent"..

After attaining a certain age, one of the popular words that relate to one's existence, and of course to one's existential crisis, is "relevance". One is either seeking answer to what "difference" he/she makes to the world around, or one is fighting his/her own case for "being indifferent" to the world around.

There must be some strong reasons why so many books are written on human psychology and behavior. Why are there so many spiritual gurus having completely contradictory views on human values, and each of them having millions of followers and an equally crazy amount of monetary assets. The irony is that even with so many books, gurus, and science-led expansion of our mental and physical capabilities, most of us are still struggling to cope with our emotional and psychological well-being.

I am often adjudicated to be non-reacting, stone-faced, emotion-less, or "indifferent" by people around me, especially by my wife. I think most of the family men (of my time) would accept these judgements by their respective lords. They'd accept this with the very indifference for which they'd have been convicted. Maybe most of us have learnt well to to justify our indifference, by reminding ourselves of the concepts like "..we are not important.." and "..sometimes no action is the best action..". Or maybe we've run out of time or energy to fight this one out of the many battles of our lives. 

I am realizing that, over the years, I've become more emotional than I ever was. I am becoming very sensitive not just towards humans but towards most of the life around me. These days whenever I am at an emotional high or low, I get out of my house and just go for a short walk in open air. I feel that the beautiful trees around me can talk, they always welcome me with an indifference towards my good or bad mood. I look into the eyes of the stray cat in our apartment. I can sense her conflicting feelings on the possibilities of getting food from me, or getting shooed away, or getting my indifference. I look at the stray dogs while dropping my son to school and notice that they bark at and chase a lot of 2-wheelers but they generally don't chase a 2-wheeler on which toddlers or infants are riding clinging to their parents. I see how the small laborers' kids roam on the road in half clothes, drenched in dust, seeing other affluent kids and still not feeling any inferiority or deprivation. May be they feel it just for a moment and then get over it quickly. I see the innocent hesitation in my maid's conduct while she asked if she could buy our old fridge. I see and sense the unspoken, deep, and held-back emotions of the people around me when I interact with them on random topics related to life. I share these feelings with very few, who I feel are sensitive enough to not pollute them. 

Regret follows whenever I accidentally share these feelings with the crowd of insensitive folks around me. The problem with this trait of mine is that it deals with a very subjective thing - our core, unrefined, unsorted feelings. A thing which is very simple, beautiful, and appreciable for its unadulterated nature, but which seems too complicated to express to others. I think one of the reasons why we want to hide our core feelings is our horrible mental conditioning of being (or at least sounding) always correct. We always want to sound strong, confident, sorted, and accepted when we talk to others. This when we've accepted and turned into bestsellers all types of gore, abusive, sexual, and violent content on OTT media platforms.

Foundation of our core feelings is mainly built of our emotional experiences with people who've been physically close to us, for a substantial amount of time. During our childhood, we experience emotions and freely express our resulting feelings, without any beautification. Unless the circumstances are abnormal, we don't subjectify or analyze our emotional experiences. During early adulthood, our close people majorly comprise of our friends, study mates, and love interests. Our feelings are mostly transactional during this phase of life. Our emotional experiences become richer and our feelings become non-transactional as we enter into the family life. Our circle of close ones undergoes a major shuffle at this stage of life. Most of the space in this circle is occupied, in permanence, by our spouse. In some cases, parents and/or siblings are able to retain a small part of their previously held territories. Then enter the other major player(s) - our child or children. Then enter the non-permanent occupants - people from our workplaces or neighborhood, who occupy spaces along the perimeter of the circle. 

With this reshuffled circle of close ones, the drama of life begins. Sometimes I visualize this whole setup like an amphitheatre. We stand tall at the centre stage of this amphiteatre, as the main subject. Our closest people are the main actors who unfold the drama of emotions. And rest of the crowd, seated along the perimeter of the amphiteatre, expresses its mixed opinions of appreciation or condemnation of the emotions that we present to them. 

We can be, or expect to be, maximally understood by the people closest to us. At the same time, we can feel maximally misunderstood and hurt by the people closest to us. Rest of the people either just enjoy the show or play their cameos and exit. 

Having read some really great books, having topped them up with maybe innocent or maybe stupid emotions of Shah Rukh Khan movies, and having analyzed myself in my times of strong emotional experiences, I've developed a habit of going deep into human feelings. Thanks to our ongoing virtual communication era, we can put our smart word-power to its max use and write smartest of things, for hours, to convince the other person of an acceptable projection of ourselves, without having to face the other person. I am often accused of not keeping in touch, over whatsapp/facebook/instagram or even over phone, with my old friends or relatives who live in other cities or countries. At the same time, the gap of many years just vanishes the moment I meet them or talk to them for even 15 mins. Within 15 mins they rediscover the emotional comfort which they'd thought I'd lost owing to my newly developed "indifference" towards them. To my few, new, physically close real friends, sometimes a simple "Hi" and an eye-contact is enough to understand each other's day and plan a peaceful evening. Just by observing the routine movements and behavior of my son, I can tell the unexpressed internal physical condition that he might be going through, before he exhibits symptoms of sickness the next day. Many a times, I sense the crude disappointment or disagreement that my wife tries hard to but fails to present to me in a subtle way, trying to avoid a situation of long-running emotional distress in the house. Many times I recover household things from unthinkable places in the house by just assessing the state of mind of my wife and son when they'd have misplaced those things, when they struggle for a long time to find them. I can sense when my apartment's staff is disturbed or unsettled because of an on-duty incident with a fellow staff member or a resident, which they cannot freely express to the residents' association. Earlier, I used to consider celebrity judges in Indian reality shows as fake cryers. But off late, just by seeing an amazing performance by socially deprived artists in these shows, my eyes fill up. On seeing a small act of a kid feeling for another kid, I have to control the tears from falling from my eyes. The problem is that when I express my understanding of these emotions & feelings to not-so-sensitive people around me, most of them fail to understand the depth and honesty of these feelings. 

I do not claim that my understanding of these unexpressed feelings is correct in all instances. I also understand that people around me do not have time and mental space to listen, absorb and then feel what I say, especially when my understanding has been found incorrect in some instances. They lose the worth of putting in their precious time and effort again to listen, absorb, and then feel what this emotional guy has to say. So whenever I feel a strong emotion, my first reaction is to try and protect that emotion. I get a little lost in the emotion, and then I just give a zipped smile or a no reaction to the other person in the scene. If that other person in the scene is my lord then I receive a stare for being an ugly, snobby, "indifferent" person. If the other person(s) in the scene is(are) friends, family, or colleagues, then I receive a few facial expressions telling how boring and not-fun a person I am. 

I might not be a great dancer but dance comes from within when a song hits the right cord deep inside the heart. For a non-dancer, without this trigger, it's very difficult to move a leg. This moment of no trigger happens more often and then people, including the closest ones, start judging accordingly. In the moment they tend to forget those times when I was happy and just flew with the music and in the mood. In last 2-3 years, every sight of a new born in my family and relatives has put me in a situation where I simply smiled with tears at the brim of my eyes, and I've been left in self wonder of why I felt like that. Somehow, I've seen such degrees of practically chosen and expressed emotions by selfish, self-obsessed, and dillusional people that I feel scared to share my emotions with general people around me. Thats why most of the times, whenever an emotion strikes, I now start enjoying it from within. While taking my bath of 5 mins, or while doing workouts, or during the first 30 mins of my day early in the morning, memories of these emotions ring a bell and I feel them again. I feel them in their entirety in the peace that surrounds me, and then as the people around get up and going with life, their "indifferent" difference and my "different" indifference begin..