I know 2 years isn’t long enough to count for an era, heck it isn’t even an eon. But if life is summed up in memories, in feelings, in what you make of them, what you learn and what you feel, how much you and things in your life change; then I am coming to the end of one. I have a habit of compartmentalizing time, of seeing how I moved from one to another. In moments somber, I sit down and suddenly I am this independent observer who is going through my life as if it were compartments on a train and looking for how things graduated, how they moved and why they have come to be the way they are today, and there is always something I chance upon, something that helps make more sense out of life than the mindless continuum it seems otherwise. For instance, I look back to the first day in college, about how unsure I was, yet how keenly awake, with every sense in anticipation of the 2 years to come. I didn’t know that it was going to be like this, but what I know already, foregone, was that it was going to be worthwhile, it was going to be important, that it would change a lot. I can say with conviction that I am stronger; I’ve seen one of the lowest points in my life. If you’ve seen Gone with the wind, which happens to be one of my all time favorite films and novels because it is about how heroic life is, then you’ll remember the scene where Grandma Tartleton tells Scarlett O’Hara that if you think you’ve seen the worst in life, you aren’t really afraid of anything. I am not going to dramatize and say that that’s how I feel, I don’t even know what the worst is, but yes, I am less afraid now.
People are great teachers, every one of them, the whole of humanity. If you think that way then you’ll know how humbling it is to know just how much there is to learn. If you observe people closely, you’ll know it’s their faces and eyes that give them away. They are like lanterns hung on an otherwise dark alley, revealing to you one more shade of the complexity that goes into making personalities. Seeing so many in just this span can tell you a lot about people, like the fact that universally what moves people is to know that what they do makes a goddamn difference, somewhere. Every one of the 300 people who joined with me as the class of ‘0709. That’s how most left jobs, hopes of a better career, postponed today’s dreams and joys, thinking some interest will somehow add up and the whole will be given back to them, somehow making them richer in experience. It was money, but that was not all. There was something more to it, something that words cannot capture, I saw it all the time, in every class assignment people burned midnight oil for, in the way they went after everything that required them to compete, from sports to B Plans to jobs. It was what kept me going in all I did here. Has the 2 years left us richer, in some way? A cynic will tell you that in a time when the whole world is impoverished and we are in crisis, me talking of riches is not just laughable, to some, I may even be cruel. But each one of us can look into our heart and know that there were some moments that made all of it worthwhile. That’s what I can tell about the compartments I went through. Even though the journey at times felt like hell, some of them just made all of it worth it.
PS: I’d like to dedicate this column to a Friend, a mentor I learned so much from that I’d name this compartment after that person. If you ever read this, you’ll know this one was for you.