boys of men

'A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand for anything.' - Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner.
These words keep ringing back in my thoughts.. and I shudder every time they do. Expectations are an evil lot - they bring with them their weight in stone and tie themselves around your ankles even before the race begins. I ran away once, and have been running ever since - or so it seems. I wasn't much over eleven then, but then you needn't be. People apparently remember and do remind.

It was one of those things that changed me - I think - at least it started to. It changed me into a listener. I used to talk - talk like there was no tomorrow. I could sit twenty people around me and tell them stories on the fly - I could make them up and keep them interested. I stutter now. I talk slow. I am the guy who eats his words. In my brain a thousand thoughts go unsaid every day - and there has been a conversation where I could have said them and they would not have been out of place. But they fade away, into where they came from - a dejected lot.

'Open books' are an ill informed lot. In an ideal non-judging world they could make sense. But that world never existed. There's a few ways to dealing with it though - one of them is from another of Khaled's lines - another mis represented lot - 'A man who has no conscience, no goodness - does not suffer'. Basically it means, a man who does not care does not suffer - as in if I don't give a damn - I don't lose a dime. This is so because goodness is a relative term. As Dickens would put it 'We forge the chains we wear in life'. It is time to understand that breaking free is an act done unto self and needs no hands of help.