Letting Go

To accept with serenity the things which cannot be changed.

I am an emotional person. I have grown up in a family which values human feelings. My mother was deeply attached to my nani and was devastated when she passed away. She has a special bonding with her sister and they talk almost daily.

I, too, am profoundly tied to my family. That explains why I struggled living in a hostel. But today I don’t write about my bonding with my family, nor friends. I write about a relationship I believe is perhaps, even deeper, more profound and more painful. And I write about letting go.

Being one of the many middle class families in India, we have had people working at our home as domestic help. Some of them have stayed with us, as happy members of the family, away from their own villages, their own families - to escape the horrors of poverty and the heart-rending circumstances they are born in.

I, as a small homely boy in the family, have never been able to maintain a distance. I was never too involved in my smartphone nor singularly devoted to my more privileged friends. Always, without exception, I have found their lives intersecting with mine. I have found myself and my family in a position to care for and love a person who has come to live with us. I have played with them , taught them how to read and write, clicked photos with them, listened to their tales of sorrow, laughed at pointless jokes, talked about my aspirations and theirs and every other thing a brother and sister could do.

These -- what should I call them; “interactions” is not an apt word, lives -- these lives I have lived have touched my very core so much so that I have resolved that when I grow up, I want to work for these people, even if that means going to a tribal area and living there without recognition.
But that is not the point of this conversation I am having with myself. I have read about unconditional love in books and experienced it in the ways my parents love me but I have found myself loving someone unconditionally only in the case of these people. I used to often intervene when they used to get a little reprimand from any of the family members even when they were clearly at fault. Sometimes, when they would misbehave and my mother would get angry, I would come up with the weirdest of explanations. In fact, even when I used to be hurt by something they said, even when I felt betrayed, my love never seemed to faint. I don’t know why. I don’t wish to claim that I did something very special or showed the “virtue” called “pity” or expressed what is known as the “guilt of privilege”. It just seemed very natural and obvious to me. I have known no other way but to love anchorless people.
But then, there comes a time when that cannot continue any longer. When due to the call of home, the longing to go back - they have to return and more often than not, return forever.

I am experiencing the same right at this moment. Someone whom I have cared for over two years is leaving and may never return. What is painful is not really the separation but the realisation that their lives may not have got better - the dread that they will once again go back to the same circumstance and squander their hard-earned money due to reasons we cannot understand. Again, I along with my mother, have tried to intervene. We have tried to think of ways in which they could build better lives but we have experienced, in simple terms, helplessness. Owing to facts I do not intend to go into here, despite our best intentions, we have not been able to “fix” the situation. It is in these times that I have felt the most pain. Imagine having loved someone for a year and then realising that not only is that person leaving but more importantly, leaving for something which is essentially what they escaped the first time, that too of their own free will. This, accompanied with the hard fact that the more you try to intervene, the worse the situation gets.

It is in these circumstances that I am trying to understand the importance of “letting go”. This is not to say that I regret my love or that I will let go of all the beautiful memories I have, nor does it mean that if given the chance to talk to them over the phone, I would decline that. It simply means, as the famous prayer goes, to ‘accept with serenity the things which cannot be changed’. To respect the other person’s circumstance and agency. To acknowledge your own limitations. To realise that things don’t always turn out the way you want them to.

At the cost of repetition, this does not mean that you resign to fate or stop making efforts to improve the situation. “Bringing change into the lives of such people is still one of my deepest desires”, I answered a dear friend when he asked me about what my yearnings were. But, I have to tell myself that there is a time for everything and that my role on this earth is to keep doing what I can, with sincerity and honesty, with dedication and passion and most importantly, with LOVE. That my prayers will be heard by the Universe. That the child in me who gets attached to people will not be betrayed in the end.

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Logo Credits : Photo by Felix Russell-Saw on Unsplash

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