Validation

 

When did Society become the moral conscience of an individual. It has become such that everything you do has to be validated by society, even if your conscience doesn’t allow it. Society wants to validate everything that is not from the manual of regular common life rule. If it is out of syllabus then you are ought to give explanation for it.

Ex : No one wants to question or seeks explanation for – Why you want to get married? You don’t require a valid reason for that. But if you want to get divorced then there has to be some valid reason. Imagine you are getting invited for a marriage party, the minute you get invitation you start checking your calendar, wardrobes, location, etc. You don’t even ask the bride/groom as why they have decided to take such big decision in life. Probably because its normal to do so, following the suite of rest of human beings. And ofcourse it is validated by the common rules of society.

Now imagine if you are invited to a divorce party. The scenario completely changes – you check with other people if they are invited, you think whether you want to go, you make a joke of it that is a divorce party really a thing. You call up the person and ask what went wrong and do they really want to throw a party for it.

Why the scenario completely changes here? Its an individual choice to do so. But the Great socio- cultural rules don’t advocate this. And hence even if the person is free from a broken relationship, he/she goes into self-doubt to celebrate it. This act is not validated. Divorce has got acceptance in changing years but again it needs to have a valid reason. For a middle class common person in India there are ground rules – extra marital affair, domestic violence, dowry, physical abuse. These are few of the valid reason to move out of a relationship. ‘Its not working out’ is not a valid reason, its not in the dictionary of socio cultural norms. But what people fail to understand is that since there was no valid reason in the first place to get married, there are high chances that individual will lack the motivation to work towards it. People tend to be lost in such relationships and prefer to stay lost because they could not find strong enough reason to move out. And irony is people blame the lost state as a reason for not working out. Then the social pressure forces them to create or find a reason which was not present in the first place J

Its not just marriage, its in professional life as well. When youths after completing their studies are asked – what plans next? Answer expected is either job or business. Why cant answer be exploring life, travel, cultures, cuisines and then I shall decide what gives me peace. One of the reason that such answer is not acceptable is – that all these experiences require money. According to the rule book, the next step after studies is earning money – being happy is secondary. That again you have to find reasons or create reasons in your job to be happy.

Then we run towards finding peace and happiness through yoga, meditation, yogic diet, Buddhism as a way of life and so on. What people tend to forget is that Buddha and his disciples never did a job for living, yet they were the most satisfied souls. They were happy spreading, preaching, practising peace of life within without seeking validation from others. And today Buddhist philosophy is practised at a global level.

Lets just find peace within ourselves without seeking validation from others that we are peaceful with whatever we have. The day we achieve this at our soul level and not physical level, we will be able to break the vicious cycle of validation.