I, as I stand, a solitary individual removed from all constraints, have intense and thorough faith in destiny. I believe it will lead me to the path that is determined for me and I will exist happily there. However, I am not a lone creature. This is why, I, as I stand within the confines of my family, and the constructs of my society, must adopt a new, practical and rational approach to ensure my peaceful and tolerable future existence. I must choose the path that best ensures sustainability - not necessarily financially, but mentally. I need to do as much as possible to be certain that I will not regret and experience a mid-life crisis. I need to choose the least terrible path. Does it cause anxiety? Of course, choosing any significant option does.
But if I choose to rely on destiny, is it possible that it will betray me? What if I do not believe in destiny at some point down my path and become angry with where what I thought was it has led me? What if I curse destiny for taking me down a trail of what I consider suffering? But the idea of suffering is so subjective, as well. It could change so quickly. What if lack of finance is suffering? Lack of status? Lack of family? Lack of experience? Excess of status? Excess of money? Burden of family? Seeing too much?
How do I choose just to be content for as close to eternity as possible? At the very least, how do I stop questioning and thinking these things because that would be just as good as making the perfect decision -- arguably even better if we accept that there is no perfect decision.
Perhaps I become a housewife to a kind rich man and never worry my pretty little head. But how do I live with the idea that all I am to those around me is a pretty little head? More importantly, how do I prevent that thought from pervading into my own mind like a worm into an apple? I can become a career woman, too, and then eternally hate myself for not making the meaningful contribution of christening my parents as grandparents.
Of course, it isn't either-or, but can I be appeased with being simply mediocre in both aspects? Like someone who is bilingual, but doesn't speak either language perfectly.
Even if I'm not mediocre, how do I sustain with the perception of possibility? If I hadn't had one, could the other have been better? I published 3 articles, but I could have published 5 if I hadn't had to run and pick up my child from its practice. Full devotion, too, could irritate me. If I could not notice the subtle changes in the architecture which accompanies me to my workplace each day because I am perpetually entangled in my work, I would feel pathetic. Not because I would be pathetic at that present time, but because a woeful extension of an empty existence is sure to plague me once my work is no more -- and it will eventually be no more, as all other things. I will be unable to perform the only talent and purpose I had, but I will be too old and contemptible to learn any new one. Like a one-trick pony that has nothing to offer once it has an injured hind leg. And at that point, like that pony, I will put myself down so as to not dwell in the agony of expecting a wretched future. I will exist in eternal bliss, reminiscing on the regrets of the past.
I thank a friend for this post. Though her technicolor emergence in my life has been, at times, stubbornly challenging, it has injected me with a jolting passion and fervor. The numbness I had become accustomed to has dissipated immensely and that thought has left me with mixed emotions -- but emotions nonetheless. It appears that the forest fire of a spirit I had had tamped out remained with but an ember, which, courtesy of her apparition, has been ignited again. I am chronically piqued by, yet forever grateful to her for showing me the exasperation of naivety, the absurdity of joy and the senselessness of love.
