4 reasons why I’d take Calvin’s advice rather than Gandalf’s

4 reasons why I’d take Calvin’s advice rather than Gandalf’s

Sometimes delightful, sometimes cynically mocking, sometimes precocious and sometimes plain poignant; everyone would admit reverting to the mischievous duo of Calvin and Hobbes, when going through the blues at one time or the other; but turning to them for a sincere piece of advice! This might cause some eyebrows to be raised in disbelief but sometimes the solution is so simple that it’s staring at us in the face and we being engrossed in the problem completely overlook it. It was during such tense moments I discovered practical wisdom concealed beneath the simple, untainted humor.

Having been brought up as the model student, the model daughter, the model citizen; I have always blindly followed rules. Neither have I ever questioned the regulations (some of them revoltingly dumb) nor the authority which imposed them on me.

Why must a barometer be used to measure only pressure? Why can’t I support an Australian cricket team in India? Why can’t I discuss sex education with my own father?

Little Calvin made me realize that I can. All it takes is a little bit of reason and some nerve, and if you feel you have inhibitions, then borrow some pluck from this 5-year old, be a little more defiant and let yourself go.

Explore yourself

With an entire world of coders, skateboarders, musicians, entrepreneurs, theater artists and goodness knows what else around me, I would often feel inadequate. I felt, I had no talent of my own. In order to not stand out as a nobody, I tried my hardest to fit in to the flock of “birds of same feather”.  And then it struck me why I wasn’t able to find my interest. I was trying to run away from everything that fascinated me, fearing the unknown, feeling like a novice. The best way out of this fear was to stop caring about the approval of others, have a little faith in myself and take the first step towards the challenge.  The rest wasn’t always easy but yes, I was happy to have found something worthwhile.

Well…Friendship

Like most people, I too found that one friend with whom I could be easy in my skin .Together, we went through some hard times, made lots of mistakes, learnt lessons, even had some minor rifts and later laughed at ourselves. Days, weeks and months rolled by and nothing changed, and then, when we looked back, we realized we had grown up.

The duo seem to have grasped some concepts , which we adults still fail to understand, with such ease that it almost teeters on the verge of contempt. We’ll try our hardest to please everyone around us but will never do what we really want to do. This snippet from Markus Natten’s poem “when did my childhood go?” captures our hypocrisy very aptly.

“When did my childhood go?

Was it the time I realized that adults were not

All they seemed to be,

They talked of love and preached of love,

But did not act so lovingly,

Was that the day!”

If only we could gather the courage to call a spade a spade…

With this I shall take my leave.

P.S.  I will end each of my posts with a life hack, which I’ve collected over the time from sources like Quora, twitter and the likes. Hope you find them useful.

LifeHack#1: If you want to download a Youtube video, simply add “ss” to the URL between www. and Youtube.