I go to bed early and can’t sleep beyond sunrise. Something I got into the habit of very early in my life. Most of my clothes are more than ten years old. I still follow road rules even when it doesn’t make sense. I cook my vathakozhambu and seppankizhangu fry the way my mom taught me more than a decade ago, which her mom taught her more than fifty years ago. I still rearrange vessels back in the shelves the way I learnt from my dad when I was a kid.
I follow a set of rules I fixed for myself much earlier in life. At some point I started believing this is not just how I live my life, but how life should be lived. And now I catch myself looking down on people who don’t live the way I do.
We are all comfortable holding on to our pasts. There’s a reason nostalgia is such a strong feeling. We like talking about those days, saying the same stories again and again, going back to the same places, following the rules we were taught back then, using the same things, living the same life. And somehow the feeling only gets stronger as you grow older.
And then we slowly stop being able to relate to people who lived differently from us. Maybe that’s why making new friends later in life feels so hard. Maybe that’s why relationships start feeling like a lot of work.
I’ve been thinking about why I believe that the only good way to live life is the way I live mine. One of the biggest things therapy has helped me see over the past couple of years is the standards I hold myself against, and how easily I end up holding everyone else to the same ones.
It’s been uncomfortable to notice how unforgiving my mind can be, even for small things. Like when I don’t place a vessel back in the shelf the way it’s supposed to be. When I extend this same way of thinking to bigger beliefs like religion, caste, or politics, I start wondering why I need to hold on to anything so dearly.
I used to believe in god when I was a kid but I grew out of it. But every time I go to the temple opposite my house, I ask Hanuman the same thing I used to ask him when I was a kid. My political beliefs have changed many times, but how I arrive at them hasn’t. I usually go with what feels most accepted by the people around me, the content I consume, the news I watch. The belief changes, but the way I get there stays the same.
Which makes me wonder if people holding on to traditions and culture are also just trying to find comfort in their pasts.
I was talking to a friend recently about how most of us in this generation won’t celebrate Pongal or Diwali the way our parents did. Just like our parents didn’t celebrate it the way their parents did. But every generation still keeps pushing the next one to do things their way. How to behave. How to talk. How to use the internet. How to live.
All of us seem to believe that only our childhoods were lived the right way, and that every other generation is somehow doing it wrong. The funny thing is we get annoyed when older people force traditions on us, but we end up doing the same thing to people younger than us.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of this loop of romanticising nostalgia. And after realising how human it is, I don’t even know if I should try. But one thing I consciously try to do now is not judge people who are just trying to find their comfort zone. People who don’t live the way I live my life.
A rule I wish I had set for myself when I was a kid. It would have been easier to follow now.