The other day, I heard about a theory that really stopped me dead in my tracks. It’s called ‘The Five-Year Stranger Theory.’ It basically states that in 5 years, most of the people whom you see daily now will become strangers. It made me realize that all of the people we try to impress: colleagues, friends, neighbors, gym buddies, the people we sit with at lunch, and so on, will become strangers. Our lives change; our priorities and dreams change. We were never made to stay the same.
This can make us feel sad, or hurt, when we think of all the things we did and tried to impress the people in our lives. But then, when we discover this, we can also realize something else. We can realize a freeing truth: that we don’t have to spend our whole life trying to please others, or shrinking who we are just to fit in with everyone else. We’re allowed to expand and to grow and change. Many people are in our lives for only a chapter of our story. So, we can learn to let them just be in that one chapter, and to not rearrange who we are, or our entire story around them. Because one chapter doesn’t define the whole book, and there are hundreds of other chapters waiting to be written and discovered.
Because no matter who comes into or goes out of our lives, we still have to live it; it’s still our story. We’re allowed to put our focus and our energy into what we love and who we want to be, instead of worrying about how we’ll fit into the mold with everyone else. When we live our whole life trying to please other people, we will one day look back and wonder if we ever truly really lived, if we were ever honestly who we wanted to be, or just who everyone else told us to be. In 5 years, most of the people around you now will fade into the background and become strangers again. Don’t live your life so focused on the background characters of your story that you forget to develop the main character in your story – yourself. Live a life that’s true to who you are inside, no matter who walks in or out.
Edited by Sonal Butley
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