By Lakshmi Balasubramani

Hello, hello… It is the month of Love, lets touch upon the suffering that comes along with it. Love is all sweet and dumps tsunamis of dopamine, but it also pours suffering. We, the migrants living away from home are the ones who haven’t escape the wrath of missing our loved ones. Ok, let’s not confine love to one person and burden the relationship alright. Now, why do we miss our loved ones though? It is the belonging we feel when we are with them, the trust, the familiarity and the confidence and comfort that comes with it. Isn’t this the secret of Love that makes it irresistible and inescapable?

How did I come to this conclusion? Because I had a hangover from visiting family in India during this holiday season. The jet lag’s gone and I’m slowly waking up to maturity, after all I’m in my early 40s. I’m also referring to the metaphoric jet lag of getting accustomed to the ways of the ‘foreign’ land. It took me over a decade to find my feet away from family, apparently, I had been through hell and back as per my psychologist. Anyways, there’s light at the end of this tunnel and I learned that the only way out is through. This is true for love too, I believe so.

The challenges we face in life and love are put in our way because we are meant to learn something from it. But, in today’s world, we’ve found a way to avoid our hardships – we quit professionally and divorce personally. The lesson repeats until it is learnt and this learning is not an easy process. So, to make continuous progress, we will have to persevere, be strong and open minded to receive the wisdom life is giving us. Not give-up. We need to take breaks and get back into the arena asap. Now, Im not saying that we should not breakup from a bad relationship, we should learn and move on to make the right choice before committing to something significant. The same goes to handling stress at the workplace. It all comes down to learning and finding our way out, we’ll have to speak up for ourselves. Professional life is easier because, once we are aware of the problem, we can find a different boss. But family – we can’t change them. So, change begins from within via evolution. We have all the opportunities and methods to learn and become better than ever.

The secret to succeeding in Love & Life is learning and evolving. Because once you’ve learned the secret to succeeding, you’ve figured that there is freedom and strength in belonging. After all, we humans are heard animals.