Wisdom sometimes is not just a choice, it’s your defense mechanism. You have to be wise beyond years to take failures and disappointments by your stride. Mature enough to not bask in the glory of your successes lest they are taken against you.

With age comes this magical ability to be objective about most things around you and inside your head. Atleast that’s the whole idea behind growing up. So when you are turning 35, there is no more a right side of 40 or wrong side of 30 anymore. Age becomes a number. If you repeat to yourself empathetically it becomes a part of your identity like gender or name . Bottom-line being, you don’t wince every time you utter it.

It’s interesting how 3 year olds take so much pride in wearing their age as a badge, telling anyone and everyone how old they are. Unfortunately 10 days away from turning 35, typing out this post shall be the closest I can come to graceful acceptance of this fact.

Birthdays are a difficult milestone to handle particularly when they are your own. Hysteria is bound to set in as one’s approaching a landmark number but this post thankfully isn’t a result of that.

This week’s prompt on ‘What’s your story’ was so well timed with this monumental countdown , one can only blame divine intervention for this chance occurrence .

A life defining theory I believe in? Quite a few actually.

Pride before everything.

Now I may not have a fancy name for the syndrome that causes one to take some reckless and mostly drastic decisions in one’s life in the name of pride but here’s the story of my life. Not a quitter yet have quit people , cities and workplaces. There are very few mistakes that I haven’t made so far. Relationship wise and work wise . Though wiser am not. But learning to walk away when that’s the only way one can carry on is an important life lesson that’s worth the bargain. Recently though , I’ve been practicing the spectacular art of ‘Emotional Detachment‘ . The result? I don’t have to seemingly quit things that are beyond my control or come in the way of my pride. I just cut the mental chord with them. Moving on.

There’s no such thing as luck.

If there is one thing that I can surely say about my life thus far then it is that I do not just get lucky. I strive , burn , work hard and then wait and wait endlessly for the simplest of things to work in my favour. Quite like the Anupam Kher syndrome perhaps , rather than Shekhar Suman one in my case. When an extremely talented actor has to start his career playing a senior citizen in his debut movie . So life doesn’t make sense all the time so you have to keep changing the way you are looking at it [ or change your definition of ‘making sense’]. Whichever way you look at it , there are happy chance happenings in general but when it comes to actions and consequences , there are no co-incidences.

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By the time I wrote this post , the next week’s prompt is out and the countdown has turned into a ‘week away’ . Which brings me to the third theory of my life.

The world needs a Hero err Heroine & you are the best person you know for the job. 

Filmy as it may sound, I am my own Superhero. The Majhi who can carve roads out of mountains. The Milkha who can beat all odds & records . The Anupam Kher who plays his movie career out in reverse. I am the person who may feel like the world’s falling apart on some days yet on most other days I feel like I can take over the world – one boardroom meeting , one blog post , one page of ‘slanting lines/sleeping lines’ at a time. Because like that quote goes from The Holiday  “You’re supposed to be the leading lady in your own life, for God’s sake!”

At 34 , I’ve played most roles one can get a chance to play and I am glad to look back at all of them to realize – good times or bad times none have been ordinary times. Next year ,  thriving at 35 , life may change yet I shall carry on being the leading lady and that’s not luck by chance.