This year, I turned twenty-nine years old. I’m fascinated by that sentence.
The characters of my life have so changed drastically over nine years, I would fail miserably at describing the impact of the last almost-decade. So many people have come and gone, and how different they all were!
As a child, you don’t think that what you have is just an vague impression of reality. You think that everything in the world belongs to you and all you could imagine was entirely possible. In our cocoons, we were safe from the future and thought to ourselves, “there’s much to experience, but what else is there to know?”
I reflect on those naïve times and I’m grateful for the worlds I created, because in my adulthood, I occasionally revisit them for comfort.
I don’t think anything changes you as much as your firsts. Once you emerge from ignorance to experience, every next thing that happens is a reminder of that first pain, and it is presented to you as just another chance to relive it.
If you don’t become addicted to it, you will then try very hard to escape it by shutting yourself out from the world, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.
And when that doesn’t work either, and you realise that the only option is to live through the suffering, you pray that within your Sisyphean hell, you’ll find some answer or peace.
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This is the last year of my twenties and the outcome of living through it is that I have become somewhat attached to my ignorance. I’m stubborn and short-tempered by nature, but by some amazing divine configuration, I also lack any great self-determination or will. I’m happy to walk the path of less confrontation, and I have definitely found it easier to just admit that I know nothing.
There’s too much of the world out there for me to care about putting my own voice in the mix, and I feel the happiest when I am far, far away from everyone else and the only thing left is just silence. I imagine that the moment I pass away, my heaven will be a place where there is no one with me, besides the gentle breeze that carries the memories of every moment and person that I have ever loved, and I’ll feel satisfied knowing that I had etched a place in my heart for them a long time ago, and there they are with me, and always will be, in my forever.