"If nothing ever went wrong in your life, you will never have a chance to grow stronger"Some days are really cool while some are warm and requires the right amount of cooling agent to turn it into the right temperature. It rained last night, further cooling the skies with freshness on winter darkness showing us all that even the weather is not perfect. With the annual Islamic religious festival "the Biswa Ijtema", being held near my house it was a chore getting to work with congested traffic. Like Gabby in her article on yahoo health and fitness had said, "I felt like I was behind the 8 ball. I didn’t feel ahead or caught up on anything any more". But, this time it was not just the traffic. Even though, unlike Gabby, I thought I had my life is in more ‘control’ than ever before. Suddenly, this morning I got up and felt like a dog was chasing its tail. I felt I was going round in circles again, friends, work, time, family and even mistakes.
Yesterday, I was at a friend’s wedding held at the Radisson Hotel. It was the first exclusive Christian wedding I have attended in my life. While I watched the entire episode with avid interest and murmured the Lord’s Prayer just in time, people around me turned to stare in wonder. I nodded and smiled back at the astonished looks I received. Needless to say here, I have attended catholic schools all my life. There are some things you never forget; things such as Christmas carols or the Lord’s Prayer. The happy moments of my past has a way of making me wish I could get back in time. And for me, my African-lived school days including Christmas carols, church prayers and the morning assembly is like a constant force through memory lane . At the wedding, like Deja vu, with the past swirling around me, I was transported into a small girl again, saying the morning prayers at the school church early in the morning. If it's so easy to remember good times, however, how can I keep forgetting past mistakes, to be made over and over again? Perhaps, that shows, how like the winter skies, I am not perfect.
But after I got home, last night, like Gabby, I had a downward spiral. How can such good memories from the past bring you down so fast? This morning, after a bad night’s sleep and sweeping back and forth from the present to the past, and the past to the present with a thump, I had trouble crawling up from bed and facing 2007. So how can you get a leg up one day and not the other? Why is it that sudden pressure makes your eyeballs twitch? I stepped back and wondered whether my past was much better than my present. I shook my head with purpose, it cannot be so, the past has good times and the bad, just like my present, and with sudden flash of realization, I knew what I was doing. I was trying to shut myself off from the present tense for just a while there, making the same mistake, yet again. Like an ostrich, thinking if I can close my eyes, I would be invisible to the world. Whenever, I do that, I know there is something amiss.
So, as soon as I got to the office this morning, I made a mental note of securing my past tense with nice memory strings to be opened only to cherish and smile and not to have a tranquilizing effect the next day.
Firm decisions made, like Gabby, I am taking a step backwards today and asking myself how I could better deal with things to make a head start in all directions. It's nice to dwell on memory lanes for a while, but running in circles with major issues do not help unless if it's in the rectification of a cause. I need to break out of the past circles and head start out in a tangent. Life isn't perfect and neither am I, so why do I keep trying to make it all just so? Trying to be perfect is nice, but only when it doesn't push mental pressure into a crescendo, thus making us want to jump on a time machine and live on a different planet. And why am I trying to live a perfect life now? After all, like Gabby says, there is no finish line and the lines are not always smooth; no one is perfect, we have to notice the beauty of imperfection in the circle of life and live with the people within.
