Remember the last time you extended your reach to the nearby showroom to buy a pair for yourself? Oh yes, this one is easy to remember. Do you know about the various kinds of shoes? Are you confused about which one to buy this season? Are you aware of the current fashion trends? Many such questions you have regarding shoes, none of which, this post is going to answer.
Let us try to sketch a picture of the first time you walked an inch on your own legs. That particular act, must have brought extreme happiness to the people who witnessed it. Teary eyed mother, a rejoicing father running after you, trying to make you walk a little more: a similar image you must be having in your mind. By the way, were you wearing shoes during that particular act? Probably no. This post is going to make you time travel from the answer of this question to what ever shoe you are wearing right now.
Why wear a shoe? Umm..there can be numerous reasons for wearing a shoe. Shoes are comforting, they can assist in running fast(Life is a race. If you don't run fast, you'll get trampled. I bet.) and everybody wears them. Fair enough: take a look around, everybody has got at least a pair. So why not you? So why can't you decide to work hard to earn all the cash needed to buy that one pair, which is envied by everyone, which comes along with a multi digit price tag, which has a renowned brand name, which is worn by your favorite film start for a 5 second advertisement.
Consider this. I don't want to wear shoes. I never wanted to wrap my legs and tie heavy knots to them. I wanted to be free. I wanted to feel the earth on which I was going to put my weight for next 22000 days. A risky affair, but I knew that this will be something I'd enjoy. I never wanted to run too-fast-too-far, I just wanted to feel every single step I was going to take towards this journey.
But then they tried to persuade me into the perks of wearing a shoe. They showed me examples of people who were successfully running ahead just because they chose to wear the right shoe early in life. No matter how much that brand new shoe inflicted blisters and cuts on their legs, such people never gave up and pretty soon the shoe got adjusted to leg (or maybe the leg got adjusted to the shoe.) Whatever happened, beyond that point of final adjustment, as they said, life became as smooth as butter.
Well, to me it always sounded funny as to how a pair of really nice shoes can make us feel proud in our heads - at the extreme opposite end of our bodies?
Finally, they got me a pair. It wasn't good but was from the popular trends. And wearing them for all these years, I can feel my legs beginning to align and adapt accordingly. Alas, as they said, these shoes which they bought for me after spending Lakhs of rupees, perhaps, is going to get me a job, a name, a respectable position in the society of common men.
I see all my friends wearing a similar pair of shoes. They say, they too, like me, were forced to wear them. This sounds comforting. Not the shoe. The shoe still hurts a lot.
I don't understand any of this. Why should I be known by the shoe I am wearing right now? Why these people insist on trying our whole life to fit our legs into a shoe everyone likes?
And when the shoe fits, it is probably worn out. If it doesn't ever, can we now change the foot, please!
