After a particularly soul wrenching heart break I was talking to a girl friend of mine and we were discussing how to get over it. Women do that. I am sure men usually have very practical solutions, like, “go get drunk dude”, or sleep with someone else, or go out with someone else, or do that drive down you have been wanting to. But women, on the other hand like to revel in the pain for a bit longer and talk about it so that the good and bad remain in the mind.
So anyway, I just mentioned to my friend I wish there was such a thing like they had in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where one can remove parts of one’s life from one’s own mind. It would save everyone so much of heart ache.
My friend very seriously looked at me and said, “But there is!”, I was so excited for a moment and I asked, “Wow, where?”….and she, with equal seriousness of the moment just previous to that, turned around and said, “It’s called moving on”. And both of us burst out laughing for a long time forgetting how to get over hear breaks.
Many months later, I was kind of thinking about this entire moving on thing and one thing that stuck out to me was that moving on particularly did not have anything to do with big, dramatic shifts of life, like, moving cities, countries, and houses etc. We can do all that and still not move on. Moving on requires one’s mind to be interested in other things, its takes a lot longer than just the change in our superficial environment. Of course superficial always helps as the chances of new things stimulating you are higher but still it takes time in my opinion.
I realised moving on reflects in small things. I changed country and all but once I moved, my house looked like I was either just moving in or moving out, but not like that of someone who has moved on for almost a year. The paintings were always leaning against a wall, were never on a wall, I still did not have a local credit card, there was no rug in my living room, a particular lamp went on with a fused bulb for about 4 months, maybe at the back of my mind I kept thinking this is a phase meant to be forgotten, a phase I did not want in the first place, so do not accumulate things because you don’t want them in any case. Because you keep thinking that this will soon be over and everything will be back to normal and you will feel happier like you did in the good old times. Without realising that today’s normal is this, your house in a state between moving in or moving out, keeping you and everyone guessing around you.
So moving on came to me in the form of acceptance that this is my life now, and I will probably never get it back and that the only justice I can do is acknowledge it. It started slowly, getting a handyman to put up the pictures, buying clothes, getting a local credit card. Rest, let’s see how that goes.
shaifalidayal 