We didn't lose time - We lost ourselves in the name of "Being Busy"

When was the last time you touched your paintbrush you swore, you'd never let go of? 

We don’t talk enough about the quiet graveyard of abandoned hobbies- the sketchbooks, the guitars resting silently, the diaries left half-written. For me, it was painting. I was obsessed with creating things- anything that my mind could spill on paper. 

And then one day life got “busy”. No announcement, no final goodbye…. Just slow fading. Gradually, I started distancing myself from the thing I loved the most. Actually, this is a rule that we lose things or people we love the most. Losing doesn’t mean you stopped loving them, we still love our hobbies. It’s just we stop allowing them to exist in our schedule. 

Nobody prepares you for the part of growing up- everyone just loves the idea of growing up. Growing up brings you different challenges and the toughest one is sacrificing the things that once made you feel alive. When a cloud of responsibilities burst on an individual, one by one, dreams are the first to get drenched. 

But this year, I thought that I would definitely balance my academics and hobbies. I convinced myself that I would now “return” to it but it was just a polite word for “never”. Few days back, I was scrolling my gallery and I found out the pictures of my paintings. It was nothing extraordinary – but for a moment I froze. I saw a version of myself that I had abandoned. The girl who stayed up late not because of deadlines, but because of her imagination refused to sleep. 

We all wait for the perfect time, we always think that will do what we love when will get the time. But that is the biggest mistake; while waiting for perfect time we lose a number of small and imperfect minutes. We could just take out 10 minutes to paint a messy flower, strum a broken cord or even write a silly poem. Not for progress. Not for productivity. Just for presence.