On Being Complete
My essay response to this week’s spiritual prompt
Back when my boys were growing up and still used to accompany us to movie theatres, the four of us went to see a Hindi movie called ‘Dil To Pagal Hai’. Loosely translated, the title means that the heart is mad/ irrational/illogical. Starring the stunningly beautiful Madhuri Dixit, and our man-for-all-seasons, the debonair Shahrukh Khan, its premise was that each of us is only half a person, until one meets the partner one is destined to meet, and then, we become complete.
I used to go all mushy seeing it. The man I lived with used to look into space, and act as though he was somewhere else: my kids used to pretend they didn’t know us. Half an hour into the movie, my sons excused themselves, ostensibly to use the washroom, and didn’t come back into the theatre. They waited for us outside. Looking back, the movie does seem corny and contrived, but the basic tenet, that there is someone out there waiting for us because they are destined to be part of our lives, is something that I find interesting.
There is a quote that says that some people are in our lives for a season, some, for a reason, and some, for life. I have lived long enough to realise the truth of that statement.
Yet, I have always had a problem with the statement that in order for our lives to be complete, we need someone else.
I feel that it is only when we are complete in ourselves that we can appreciate the completeness in others around, or with, us. When we look for other people to complete us, we are looking for a crutch to lean on, and the leaning and listing towards another person will always signal a fractured relationship. A relationship where there is no balance of power, where one will always be, or feel superior, because the other feels inferior.
It is not that we don’t need people. We do. Are we dependent on them? Yes. Do they make our life richer by being part of it? Yes. Do our lives become more meaningful because of their presence? Yes.
However, is the need for them so constant in our lives that at no point in time can we be by ourselves, settle down with our own thoughts, or have something to entertain ourselves with, thus resulting in our feeling guilty or helpless when they are not around?
Are the silences between us comfortable ones or does one person rush in to fill the silences with small talk, nervous monologues, and inane questions?
Does the need to think our own thoughts, and be by ourselves, signal ‘disloyalty’ to the other person?
The following are three stages of Nora’s transition to find herself, and be complete, in Henrik Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House.’
HELMER:
Aha! so my obstinate little woman is obliged to get someone to come to her rescue?
NORA:
Yes, Torvald, I can’t get along a bit without your help.
HELMER:
Very well, I will think it over, we shall manage to hit upon something.NORA:
[after a short silence]. Isn’t there one thing that strikes you as strange in our sitting here like this?
HELMER:
What is that?
NORA:
We have been married now eight years. Does it not occur to you that this is the first time we two, you and I, husband and wife, have had a serious conversation?HELMER:
It’s shocking. This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties.
NORA:
What do you consider my most sacred duties?
HELMER:
Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?
NORA:
I have other duties just as sacred.
HELMER:
That you have not. What duties could those be?
NORA:
Duties to myself.
HELMER:
Before all else, you are a wife and a mother.
Sometimes, this feeling that one can only be complete with the help of another takes a dangerous, and at times fatal turn. I had a student who sent me a cryptic message one day asking me how dangerous pesticide was. Alarm bells went off in my mind, and even though it was almost midnight, and probably too late to call up anyone, let alone a student, I called her up. It was 1.39 am the next day, when, utterly exhausted, I put my phone down. I couldn’t sleep even though I was drained.
The conversation had begun abruptly. These were her opening words: “My boyfriend’s mother rang me up,” she said, “she told me that her son had bought a bottle of pesticide and was about to drink it, when they saw him, because I don’t love him anymore.”
Too shocked to reply, I was silent, speechless. Drearily she said, “She told me I was a wicked girl and I would go straight to hell.” She stopped talking: and I began. I spoke to her for almost half an hour, before she began to respond, in monosyllables at first, then, in words, and then, sentences. Feeling both relieved and encouraged, I went on and on. She began to reply, and by the time my phone got almost completely discharged, I was able to coax a laugh, a small thread of sound, out of her. To reinforce what I had told her, I asked her to meet me in the college cafeteria the next day. She did, and we spoke some more.
She lives and works in Germany now, and says she sees no need to rush into commitments of any kind, and she can wait until someone ‘who isn’t a leech’ comes along. Else, she is happy, single.
Complete.
It is good to feel that another person understands us so well that we seem like an extension of each other’s personalities. But even in that ideal situation, are we leaning into another, because that’s the only way we can stand?
And yet, even in this completeness, there is love, love among equals, love that can boldly and confidently say:
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.”
Robert Browning
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
This is my response to this prompt by Marcus aka Gregory Maidman, in Ravyne Hawke’s Promptly Written:
“The purpose of a relationship is not to have another who might complete you, but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.” — Neale Donald Walsch from Conversations with God, Book 1
in this story:
