To smell the Flowers

As I sit in my room which I refuse to light up because for some reason I prefer the calmness of a dark room, I think back to what my first year Urdu HASS teach Sir Asif Aslam Farrukhi had said in our last class together.

He said,
"Don't forget to smell the flowers"

I understood him, albeit differently than I understand him now.

Back then, I thought he was talking about the importance of just smelling the flowers, being in tune with nature and being in tune with your own humanity. It felt like it was a choice that we will have to make, and I was ready to do it. To spend a moment with my humanity, as an add on to all the other things that I will indulge in to sustain my life.

But today, as I sit in my room recovering from a particular dip in my life, I feel his words differently. I have mostly been curious as to how it started. When and how did my dip start? Always pays off to have a virtual boyfriend who can be your mirror and sounding board. I was venting out to him and he simply said,

"Its when you started spending all your time only studying babe."

It made sense. It was all gradually going downhill, maybe inevitably, when Bilal's bike broke down and I did not have something to look forward to on my Sundays. Those hours that I kind of looked forward to talking to my virtual boyfriend also became uncertain and boiled down to weeks of absence, because well, such is life, and my days off just became days that I was still worried about things. And then came exam season, and I took my free days away from me.

In conclusion, I lost myself.

I lost myself bad. Everything that I loved and held close to my heart, everything that was me, I kept putting it off because "I had to study". I put all my eggs in this one basket, and the hopes attached to that basket just kept increasing, I was hoping that this one basket will give me the validation that I needed, my expectations just kept rising, and in the end, the basket crashed under the weight of my own expectations.

I wasn't writing, because I didn't have the time. I wasn't reading, because no time. I wasn't practicing Spanish like I wanted to I just wasn't doing much.
And so I think my mind and body started rebelling. It had to come to this point for me to realize what I had been doing to myself.

Which is why I am sitting in my room reminding myself of what Sir Asif Farrukhi had said four years ago,

"Don't forget to smell the flowers"

And right now, I feel like it was never a choice that I had to choose from. It was a need. An inherent need to connect with my humanity, without which my soul (if I may) will rebel. It will act out against the deprivation that I was inflicting upon it.

I don't know how I will continue from here, but I do know that maybe realizing this much about myself is tiny steps towards feeling better. I don't know how I will manage, or what I will do, or how I will think, but I do know that right now, I just need to slow down, and smell the flowers.