Shimbo Pastory
This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper on 12th October, 2021.
As the world markets ‘solutions to problems,’ several ways have been devised to make people customers as they develop a feeling that they dearly need such solutions. While those who experience problems are in the daily struggle to get them solved, those who don’t have them are daily drawn by disguised baits to claim such problems.
In the course of learning, one is gradually swallowed with a feeling that he or she might have that problem or is at a very high risk of getting it. This alone ruins lives, shatters dreams, and kills the hard-earned motivations to cope with life. This is where we will begin, or else it is where we will end.
Interpretation of joyous life today, is for many, no longer accepting what comes around with happiness, contentment and courage, but finding the ideal and perfect phenomenon in every scenario of life.
All forms of difficulty, deficiency or impairment are thus abhorred, cursed, denounced, and concealed.
I find the word anxiety to be a good fit for this phenomenon. Experts define anxiety as a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear that can be mild or severe. This feeling is in every human person, and it goes above average levels at certain points in life. It is a reality of life, which many people find hard to control.
Anxiety develops atelophobia which is not necessarily extreme perfectionism but also the persistent and unrealistic fear of imperfection. Imperfection seems to be so bad an image, a contemptible bondage and a shameful thing that it creates emotional distress. The question is: how ‘well ‘do we desire to be?
One can have perfect health, but again with intolerable behavioural glitches. Another can as well have a very highly functional intelligence, and yet find oneself in a wrong circle that diminishes one’s utility and does not allow one to progress.
The fact of not being perfectly well should be clear in our minds. It is a reality in all human persons, not an alienated ghost that chases after us. In that, it should be accepted, examined, understood, confessed, embraced, and remembered.
Do not buy anxiety. The fact that people around you display no greater problems than yours does not suffice to mean that they are trudging an easy road than you are.
What anxiety does is that it first kills a sense of love and appreciation towards ourselves and others. Anxiety fills one with a feeling of loss, uncertainty and frustration. In its extremes anxiety dissociates one from the true parameters of friendship, time, dutifulness, appetite, enjoyment and bliss.
As a result of that anxiety determines one to give personal meaning to the principles guiding the generously flowing stream of life and the variant courses are taken by the aforementioned parameters.
Ranking high on our scale of personal wellness should be the deep-rooted drive to be genuine. Not just because it is a reputable thing, but because it befits our joyous and free-dimensional personal progress.
The human life canvas allows the possibility of painting any image whatsoever. No image looks good when its most beautiful portions are rather covers for other clandestine ugly spots.
With one’s irremediable weak spots treated acquiescently, one gets more time to decorate the canvas, endow more beauty to the most attractive features, and make one’s weak spots pleasant additives to the same.
A perfect and happy life is possible even in an imperfect and unhappy world. It is just trade as even anxiety makes one a customer of the same shop.
The world might tend to hold our hands not wipe our tears. It might try to fix our necks looking backwards that we break down in cries as we look at the scars of the wounds suffered. This is done without us knowing, as the wealthiest commerce trades in such deceptions.
A great percentage of instruction about problems is an initiative of selling such problems to sell their solutions too. This is a loopback technique and the keepalive messages are unceasing. We ought to be happy, and not insecure that we are not well enough to cope with what life has to offer.
