My cousin posted this message on her status board a few days ago and it got me thinking. I’m sure my cousin must have given some thought to her journey prior to posting this message but putting these into context, these milestones, sometimes, appear right beside one another as if they were one. May be, nowhere is still somewhere or somewhere is again nowhere unless there’s some level of certainty to the direction in which life is taking you or you’re taking your life. In my case, I’m not so sure. I’m keen to go in one direction but I sometimes get the premonition that life wants to take me in another. And that’s why this conundrum becomes even more difficult to solve.

It is always easy to introspect a journey after you’ve covered the milestones but passing through them one step at a time is always the hard part, especially, if you’ve taken the road less traveled or never traveled. And then there’s resistance that the road less traveled brings at every corner which forces you to rethink each time. We may brave it for a while thinking it is usual to meet with a few adversities on such journeys but repeated failures sometimes break your spirit; that spirit that makes you wake up every morning with a smile to take on life with good vibes and it is difficult to revive that spirit once gone.

It has happened to me too in the past and that’s why it became so difficult to explain yesterday when asked. We were playing a game where an app (I don’t quite remember the name) would throw up these random questions which we would have to answer truthfully. The question posed to me was quite simple – ‘How would I describe the highest and lowest points of my life?’ I pondered over the question for a fairly long time and I couldn’t answer the question because there were multiple points of failure that I could categorize as the lowest points. My friends thought I was reluctant to reveal the complexities of my life and passed the question on to others but little did they realize that my brain was still comparing and contrasting the multiple points of failure.

When I turned twenty eight, I put myself in a position from where I could take on life’s revelations with an indomitable spirit. But then, little did I know that that spirit would bring about my downfall every time I experienced it. That spirit would make me think about improbable life directions and worse, set me up on those routes to try and achieve the unthinkable. There were three points of failure. The first failure was in pursuing a love that was impossible to fulfill. But we all know how decisions in love can be sometimes. When I overcame that, the spirit chased a dream in sports. Even though I became a decent tennis player with good coaching prospects, yet, what I destroyed in the process was worth a lot more. Last but not the least was the high of working with a top notch team, building world class products that were a decade ahead of any competition, worthy of multiple patents. Now that I think about it, it was probably the highest point in my life too which I moved away from for good reasons but in a reckless manner. Even though the nadirs of that fall gave way to fulfilling a life-long ambition of getting an MBA from a top notch school, I again paid a price way higher than one would or should.  

I feel that high again but I am alert this time because I am a little wary of this spirit. Every time it pops its head out and tries to get aggressive, I put a glass of ice cold water over it just just so it calms down and doesn’t take foolish decisions on my behalf. I see myself and this spirit as two separate beings now with the decision making control firmly in my grasp. I don’t want to be right but I am tired of going wrong. Going through a spiral is good sometimes because of the churn but setting yourself up for a spiral every time would be foolishness and I’ve been a fool far too many times in these last twelve years that I have enough reasons not to be one any more for a foreseeable time.

That said, as far as I am concerned, I am somewhere, nowhere close to where I want to be but I am somewhere. And I am determined this time to make this somewhere count because it has given me the courage to silence my incorrigible spirit. That I build lasting memories, mostly good ones on my way to my destination is what matters most.

“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child; garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; this is to have succeeded.”

I couldn’t agree more with Sir Ralph Waldo Emerson.