We’re all familiar with the major problems that probably all of us (excluding millionaire brats, because they’re well settled in life) face every single day. From worries related to our jobs, to the usual travails of relationships and friendships, each day brings a set of challenges, which more often than not, leave us with equal measures of joy and dejection – and thanks to the times and circumstances under which we live, we always gauge the latter to be more than the former.
I think God (or the Higgs Boson, maybe!) listens to us sometimes. I was in the middle of a mad week of whirlwind work and the pressures it brings, when I got a call from an old friend who’s in town. And looking back, I like the way all the work, all the deadlines just flew out of the window as I tried to fit my schedule around meeting this fella, instead of the other way round where I’d probably try to fit the fella into the schedule. After two days of coordinating, we finally did meet up today. Short though the meeting was, it was brilliant nonetheless. We landed up at one of my favorite watering holes in town, and spent the next few hours reminiscencing about our lives so far – and it amazed me, like it always does, that the present just ceased to matter for a while, as we discussed the unmentionable skulduggery we committed back when we were in our teens. A flood of memories came rushing back, reminding me of our crazy exploits, of days spent in empty classrooms discussing issues we weren’t expected to wrap our heads around at that age. Of my incessant efforts to date a girl from our class (God bless the poor thing, it must have been a nightmare for her!), of his mad crush on a particularly young and pretty professor, and above all, of those times spent wondering about where we would land up ten years from then.
Those ten years have passed, and we’ve both come a long way, as have all those other pseudo-neanderthal fruitcakes we called our buddies. Twists of life have taken each of us in directions we wouldn’t have imagined possible at the time. A particularly smart and enterprising friend of ours has passed on after a tragic accident, while a jerk we never expected anything from is now working with a great firm and has made a great life for himself. Each of our stories follows different paths, perhaps, but the story is the same – we’ve made it out, we’re alive, and we’re not stopping.
Maybe such moments of introspection are necessary every once in a while, because when we’re at our lowest ebbs, it certainly helps to just look back along the path we’ve traveled. To show us how far we’ve come, to show us how much further we still have to go, and above all, to show us the limits of what we’re capable of. And once you see the way the world would define you, you do begin to believe that your capabilities are far beyond what you’d usually assume them to be. Because sometimes, when the future poses a question, look back. The answer’s already there in your past.
Hellionworks - Mindspace 