To be young is a blessing and being young comes with a package. Somehow, as youth energy is high-flow realism, often, a trouble or a crucial question of life and living gets blown out of proportion at the hands of young. As marriage has growingly become a complex issue and as growing number of marriages are facing troubles, this perception is being made out in populist psyche that Young Men And Women Are Reluctant To Get Married…!” Is it so?
Somehow, the right or logically appropriate answer is still evolving as the question itself is just in its inception or perceptionally disproportionate. Still, the talk is everywhere that young ones are not very inclined to marriage, especially young women, who are empowered and independent!
Before we attempt to answer this evolving question, let us first spare some precious time for a passage below, which shall probably help in delving into the perspectives of the question. No question of life is isolated from other questions. That is why, a holistic perspective about life-living and milieus may be rightfully appropriate here to understand the nature and scope of the question at hand as why it is being made out that The Young Men And Women Are Reluctant To Get Married…
Do kindly let the passage below sink in… what sinks in, stays…
“The dawn was still processing its registry… the birds had though geared up for the day… flowers stirring and looking eastward set to welcome their beloved Sun…. A boy was awake too, marshalling his goats. She could clearly hear him singing in his pastoral best shrieking tone…
“She sat by the window of her house watching and enjoying the blank sky. The grey sky would gradually turn crimson and finally golden. The darkness of the sky was what she was enjoying. She had a feeling it would look wonderful as and when dawn would herald its inevitable arrival...
“She reminisced and smiled. How many times in her life, she found and cherished loads of purposes. She smiled because she realized how important stupidities of life are... how they extend you the chance to be wise. How people miss the relevance of stupidities as catalyst of wisdom.
“She recalled the efforts and pain she had to invest in the preparedness for attaining her purposes at different stages of her life. And look at the brilliance of the conspiracy of almighty; whenever she prepared hard and meticulously for a purpose she wanted to attain, she would invariably fail. She would feel bad, low and frustrated about the wastage of her investments. Most of her successes however came when she had done the least preparation and was not even sure of the purpose...
“She had finally accepted; preparation and purpose had a strange relationship. She wished to come to terms with the realization that preparation for a purpose is a misnomer. The preparedness is required for something, which is uncertain. Her father would often tell her – ‘Hope for the best and be prepared for the worst’. She realized it that what is certain and a definite purpose is what falls in the realm of hope. Preparedness is required for what is uncertain and does not form a purpose. If preparedness and purpose were linear realities, there would have been far more success stories on earth. Success remains as handful exceptions… success has traditionally been referred to as object of desire, hope and dreams. The real world faces the trouble that failures are the rule and most people are least prepared for it….
“She realized; one needs to be in the state of ‘readiness’, not for a specific purpose but as life in general. One needs not to ‘prepare’ but to be ‘ready’. Readiness itself is the larger purpose for all preparedness. Preparedness is only a process whereas readiness is the end product; the final destination. The readiness is required not only for failures but also for successes. Handling success is more tedious task than handling failures. Success requires larger readiness.
“She smiled as she realized she had attained readiness. When you attain, you go blank. The zero is the highest point of readiness. She thanked the almighty for bestowing upon her a series of crises and loads of stupidities … this journey to zero was necessary. She however prayed that the wisdom of zero remained with her. She wished to continue with her ‘readiness’ and not be part of any ‘preparedness’ in future.
“She had realized her stupidity. The road ahead was clear to her. She had gone past the fear factor in her life. And, the readiness, the ultimate and exalted beingness was just beyond the confines of the fear factor. She remembered, how since childhood, she struggled to conquer a series of fears she thought she was born with. She grew up demolishing them but only to realize that she had added more fears than she overpowered.
“The existential fears were replaced by fears that society offloaded on her. She grew up accepting so many benchmarks of successes and goodness that her family, her peer group, her seniors, icons and leaders lined up for her to follow. She grew up preparing hard to win all the benchmarks and in time got more apprehensive of failures and loses.
“Even successes that came when she expected them the least, made her bury deeper in the abyss of fear. Each success only stretched the benchmarks and prolonged the process of preparedness. The fear never went away; rather it grew up engulfing her beingness totally. She could not understand the elusiveness of the state of readiness; a stage after reaching where she could say she had finally arrived. She could not understand the hydra-headedness of the fear; that no doubt egged her to higher stage of preparedness but never allowed her the basic urge of a lasting satisfaction. She had even started believing that life is a never-ending ‘preparedness-struggle’ for the elusive satisfaction of ‘readiness’…
“The state of zero, the state of quintessential readiness, the state of unattached consciousness made her realize for the first time what wins all fears. It taught her to rise above the process of preparedness to the ultimate stage of readiness. She truly understood why she felt fearless. When it happens; all good and cherished ideals of humanity fall in your lap, they fill your being. It embodies all goodness – honesty, innocence, transparency, selflessness and egolessness and above all the compassion.
“It does the magic…. It makes the willful merger of individualism into the collectivity; the individuality of ‘I’ dissolving into the collectivity of ‘us’. It fills the heart and mind with compassion and when compassion plays the music in the heart, all cherished ideals and goodness of humanity get drawn into the mind. The fear goes away the next moment as this happens. She thanked the almighty for making her understand the fear factor and its dynamics.
“Readiness leads you to the door…. the entry point of zero but then, you have to step ahead to be into the zero. Every human being is blessed to attain this readiness as all human beings are given at least one chance to experience it.
“To the blessed ones is revealed the music of compassion…
“… It leads one to the ultimate empowerment of self – the ability to forgive. When forgiveness becomes the first instinct, it is a sure sign that the stage of readiness has been attained. The forgiveness is attaining the blank, the zero, the ultimate empowerment, the readiness. You accept nothing - no pride, no self, no ego, no ‘I’ and you give everything as you forgive....”
… Thanks for your patience to go through the passage above.
Now, we come back to our question at hand. This metaphor about two key terms of life-living, in response to the milieus we all live in –
These two elements of consciousness may be applied to marriages and their overall supposition of being a difficult terrain. It may help…
Ideally, falling in love is somehow option-less as it is instinctive. We are definitively wired to be in perpetuity of love. That is why, falling in love needs no readiness. It is beyond choice and conscious decision and that is why, almost everyone is in love or wishes to be in love. Being in love is akin to being in the stage of ‘preparedness’.
However, opting to get marriage is not visceral. It is always a conscious choice, unlike love. We all feel and accept that love happens, it is not done or made to happen. Marriage however, does not happen; it has to be made to happen. Definitively, marriage is the stage of ‘readiness’.
This preparedness and readiness dualism itself is the cause of our question – this disinclination towards marriage. We all are very well aware that even this instinctive love is so much infested with precarious emotions, unsettled behavior-action and often some inexplicable pains. This surely stands as a big factor to feel a strange ‘fear’ for the inevitability called marriage.
It is rather interesting that most young men and women seldom admit that they are averse to marriage. However, what they do is – ‘Procrastination Politics’. They all are finding enough implicit or explicit causes to procrastinate marriage decision.
This procrastination attitude itself points out to the fact that there is a lurking ‘fear-factor’ (about definitive ‘success’ of an ‘enterprise’), not only about love and marriages but also about many key decisions of life. This procrastination is the precarious personality positioning of a mind consciousness, which somehow stands trapped in ‘mismanagement of fears’. The young ones can handle ‘fear’ but they are procrastinating as this head-on desire to ‘manage fear’ is missing. We all know and accept that there is victory beyond fear, but the procrastination to step beyond it takes control.
If we begin to list cause for this procrastination attitude, there can be a list, which may be endless. However, the core causality is what the above metaphor about ‘preparedness’ and ‘readiness’ lists as.
I humbly repeat what has been said above – The ultimate empowerment of self, the definitive ‘readiness’ in life is – The Ability To Forgive. And, this is gender-neutral. No doubt, not only love and marriages, but in all our relationships, we and others can commit mistakes. We are all humans and we do err. However, we all need to arrive at the stage of ‘Readiness’ – This compassionate consciousness, which is empowered with the ability to forgive. Attitude towards success needs more compassion than attitude towards failures.
When forgiveness becomes the first instinct, it is a sure sign that the stage of readiness has been attained. The forgiveness is attaining the blank, the zero, the ultimate empowerment, the readiness. You accept nothing - no pride, no self, no ego, no ‘I’ and you give everything as you forgive....
As this happens, love is divine and marriage becomes this abode of resplendent readiness. As this happens, we all shall begin to accept that neither love, nor marriage, nor any relationship is the cause of trouble. The primary and core trouble is our own lack of ‘readiness’. We all need to arrive at the stage of ‘Readiness’ – This Compassionate Consciousness…
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