Lost and Found
Visiting Seattle is like a pilgrimage to me. Every time I have come to this city, I always leave a changed man. This ritual has even happened even before I met any of my online friends in this fair city. Somehow, over the course of a few days, I come to some realisation about my life that was just at the tip of my mind before coming... only to be inundated with it when I leave. Such a thing has already happened to me on this pilgrimage.
One of the many paradoxes of life is that people very rarely like to admit that they are lost. After all, it’s not a comfortable feeling, and almost always it is said with some degree of embarrassment. It today’s culture, the popular belief, or at least so it seems to me, is that it is shameful to admit that oneself is lost. When questioned, the natural instinct is to say that he or she knows precisely what he or she is doing, even if the contrary is the more truthful statement. More often than not, people are even prone to say that they are on “the right path” to achieving what they want out of life, that what they are doing will one day inevitably bring them happiness, even it has only brought nothing but misery.
This, of course, begs the question: Which of us are the truth-tellers, and which of us are doing nothing more than deluding ourselves?
I myself was one of the latter. Over the past few months, I have been living a convenient lie. The lie was that I was happy. Sure, there were those “silver lining” moments when everything really was going okay, but on average the strain that life was placing on me was nigh unbearable. If it wasn’t one thing tugging at my last nerve, it was another. Whether it was work, dealing with my mother’s illness, fleeing from my roommate’s pessimism, something was always clawing at me, bringing me down. It took a single phone call to one of my friends to realise that I was collapsing even if I had thought, deep down, that I was doing quite well, thank you. Time, you see, was hardly my friend in this mess, and I had spent so much time into relieving the pain in such trivial ways that I refused to admit that there was thorn in my side from the get go. I surrounded myself with delusions of order despite the fact that chaos was slipping into my life, despite the fact that chaos was slowly garnering control over my future and destiny. This, of course, is not the solution to the problem.
I was lost, deluding myself into thinking that I knew precisely where I was.
Through the meeting of two great friends and two relative strangers, now hardly so, I have come to realise that my vision of the future was hardly what I thought it was. The dreams I had once dared to dream... I had foolishly all but tossed into one of the many mental file drawers, nearly having given up on them. The chances that I had been talking about forever of moving somewhere else where the possibilities for a successful life... I had all but abandoned. I was talking, but I was not walking. I was telling myself, quite convincingly as well, that my dreams and my wishes really didn’t matter to me, that the few things I had around me were enough to fulfil my need for happiness. I would be able to laugh at that if it weren’t so serious a matter. The vow I had made to disavow the sure thing as the only viable option... I had silently discarded without looking back.
Now the world has been turned upside down, or rather right side up. I have found out where I am and what I want, yet paradoxically, I feel completely lost. The lie dispelled from me, I now look into the mirror to find that the quiet confidence I had has turned into a quiet fear. For now I am once again faced with the choice of fulfilling the dream I have wanted to pursue for so long; I am staring at the truth, brighter than any star in the sky, yet in doing so, I am afraid at the things that must be sacrificed to do this. To follow my dreams means having to pick up my roots and transplant them into fresher, more promising soil, it means having to rip away the entrenched vines from my family, even if only temporarily, and it means starting out into the world truly on my own (although that is a delusion in and of itself).
Through all of these sacrifices, the whispers of failure can be heard, and failure is not something that I am intimately familiar with. My grades, my work, my friends... I have almost always been flawless in my execution of this. It is perhaps the only reason why I am afraid of failure. Yet, daring to quote, or at least paraphrase, the wise words of another, “Even if you should fail, you should fail while you’re still young, while failure is still an option.”
Once again, I am found. I still stand at the crossroads of life, waiting to make my decision on destiny. I know which of the paths are down “the wrong trail”. God, give me the strength and the daring to chose one of the right ones.
One of the many paradoxes of life is that people very rarely like to admit that they are lost. After all, it’s not a comfortable feeling, and almost always it is said with some degree of embarrassment. It today’s culture, the popular belief, or at least so it seems to me, is that it is shameful to admit that oneself is lost. When questioned, the natural instinct is to say that he or she knows precisely what he or she is doing, even if the contrary is the more truthful statement. More often than not, people are even prone to say that they are on “the right path” to achieving what they want out of life, that what they are doing will one day inevitably bring them happiness, even it has only brought nothing but misery.
This, of course, begs the question: Which of us are the truth-tellers, and which of us are doing nothing more than deluding ourselves?
I myself was one of the latter. Over the past few months, I have been living a convenient lie. The lie was that I was happy. Sure, there were those “silver lining” moments when everything really was going okay, but on average the strain that life was placing on me was nigh unbearable. If it wasn’t one thing tugging at my last nerve, it was another. Whether it was work, dealing with my mother’s illness, fleeing from my roommate’s pessimism, something was always clawing at me, bringing me down. It took a single phone call to one of my friends to realise that I was collapsing even if I had thought, deep down, that I was doing quite well, thank you. Time, you see, was hardly my friend in this mess, and I had spent so much time into relieving the pain in such trivial ways that I refused to admit that there was thorn in my side from the get go. I surrounded myself with delusions of order despite the fact that chaos was slipping into my life, despite the fact that chaos was slowly garnering control over my future and destiny. This, of course, is not the solution to the problem.
I was lost, deluding myself into thinking that I knew precisely where I was.
Through the meeting of two great friends and two relative strangers, now hardly so, I have come to realise that my vision of the future was hardly what I thought it was. The dreams I had once dared to dream... I had foolishly all but tossed into one of the many mental file drawers, nearly having given up on them. The chances that I had been talking about forever of moving somewhere else where the possibilities for a successful life... I had all but abandoned. I was talking, but I was not walking. I was telling myself, quite convincingly as well, that my dreams and my wishes really didn’t matter to me, that the few things I had around me were enough to fulfil my need for happiness. I would be able to laugh at that if it weren’t so serious a matter. The vow I had made to disavow the sure thing as the only viable option... I had silently discarded without looking back.
Now the world has been turned upside down, or rather right side up. I have found out where I am and what I want, yet paradoxically, I feel completely lost. The lie dispelled from me, I now look into the mirror to find that the quiet confidence I had has turned into a quiet fear. For now I am once again faced with the choice of fulfilling the dream I have wanted to pursue for so long; I am staring at the truth, brighter than any star in the sky, yet in doing so, I am afraid at the things that must be sacrificed to do this. To follow my dreams means having to pick up my roots and transplant them into fresher, more promising soil, it means having to rip away the entrenched vines from my family, even if only temporarily, and it means starting out into the world truly on my own (although that is a delusion in and of itself).
Through all of these sacrifices, the whispers of failure can be heard, and failure is not something that I am intimately familiar with. My grades, my work, my friends... I have almost always been flawless in my execution of this. It is perhaps the only reason why I am afraid of failure. Yet, daring to quote, or at least paraphrase, the wise words of another, “Even if you should fail, you should fail while you’re still young, while failure is still an option.”
Once again, I am found. I still stand at the crossroads of life, waiting to make my decision on destiny. I know which of the paths are down “the wrong trail”. God, give me the strength and the daring to chose one of the right ones.