Resilience in love...

I thank God for having made me a woman. Women they say have immense resilience, and i appreciate my capacity on the same.
I have felt great eversince i resurrected the habit of writing. I dont know why & what forced me to do away with it, but eversince i have returned to it there has been a spring in my stride, a jingle in my voice, a gleam in my eyes & to top it all, an awareness of who am i. Over the past few days I have written nothing that could propel a rocket or shake this world, infact if I were to categorize all my recent writings in one word, i d rather say it was 'folly'. But the myself in me would never discount even an act of folly, because all big things begin very small. I dont know where this second life in writing will lead me to , but I can sense round the corner some big time awareness about my own self.
For the past two years (or maybe the time since I came to Mumbai), I have been running after one thing or the other, and if I were to enumerate what these things were, I would probably spend all day thinking about it and yet not come up with anything concrete or worth sharing. The conclusion is simple, while Mumbai nagariya which can easily be epithet as mayanagari, has had no concrete development to offer to me, all it had me grow in was maya. All people here run after maya, and involuntarily I too had joined the race, not realising that the love that is such an inherent need of me was taking a back seat. And now I know that expecting love from someone else was maya again, and so if at all I need something, I need to love myself.
Marraiges they say is all about Falling in love with the same person over and over again, several times. I say the same about one's individuality, one's confidence, one's personality. To encourage an integration/a marraige between what you want to be, and what you are, you have to fall in love with yourself over & over again. The last time I was in love with me was when I was in IIT, when my solitude was of utmost importance, my ability to converse with my own self, all alone, at a time of the day when the campus was all asleep was what led me to the realisation of what shubham was all about. I still rememeber the deserted streets of IITK, at 3 am, when all hall canteens closed, the roads had nobody walking on them, yet there were the few bustops where the love couple found sweet refuge ;). that was the time when me & my bicycle raced on the roads unbridled.... someone who would have seen me speeding then, would have coined me a 'rash' rider, but for those lesser mortals the realisation of how aware I was about myself was unfathomable, and for me its unmatchable till date.
And now I know why then i had so many admirers of my confidence, my abilities, my personality: because I knew who I was!!
I tried to keep my awareness of the same alive for as long as I could in IITK, but the practical considerations guiding my whole purpose of being in an MBA program ( i.e. finding a job), just pulled me off it. Though people like me never doubted a goodjob for themselves, and even when it happened i was more proud of how it shaped up than how skeptical I had been of it. My subsequent life in Mumbai didnt help the cause of bringing self-awareness any bit.
Though I was involuntarily pulled into the sundries of life in mumbai, on occassions I did make attempts to break the shackles. I still remember my 4 am tryst with myself at Marine drive. I, lying on the pavement next to the sea- gazing up at the starlit sky, with the breeze offering the same sparsh which a husband exceptionalizes for his wife, when they vow in marraige. All those who came to know about this excursion(excursion for them, tryst for me), could just not fathom that I used something as utilitarian & torturous as the mumbai local train to reach a place which had an idle waterbody, and that too at 4 am in the morning!! They made me feel more foolish, than i felt aware of myself thereafter!!
I never did that again...not that had I done it everyday, would I have derived the same pleasure. Because, after all, the effort of getting to marine drive from andheri(where I live) every morning is quite a lot, if not gargantuan.
Recently, a friend of mine called me up to discuss the instability that he was facing in his current job. From what I knew about his job, I knew this would have come up sooner or later. He used to take his job very lightly, and I knew he could enjoy it as long as it lasted, but the day it would be over, the realisation that 'job is after all rozi-roti and you cant mess with it' will have to don on him. I advised him to be a little more serious about his job. When I look at my life over the past couple of months, I see incident very similar to what happened to my friend. And I think its time for me to take the same medicine which I prescribed to him. While such incidents can seem scarily destabilizing, their purpose is not to break us but to shake us into a new level of awareness. And as I graduate to this new level, I know I am falling in love, once again, all over again, all with myself, and I thank God for having given me the resilience to fall in love again and again.
Recently someone, who was very awed at how arrogant I am about my own self, asked me:
"Tum apneaap se bahut pyaar karti ho na?"
Though sounding filmy, I didnt hesitate in answering "Haan, main apni favorite hun!"

P.S. Lots of thougts, but same theme, all bundled up together, i am not sure how much justice have I done to the basic theme after all!