“Inhale, exhale
Think…
Simplify and breathe…tweak the perspective”
It jolted me out of that moment of self-pity, “me-against-the world” syndrome and agita. I was at the bottom of the world again when I was reading an e-mail from San Jose, California, which had me leaning back from my laptop monitor and pondering on what she said.
“Lately, I’ve learned to see life as glass half full instead of half empty. The paradigm shift is ridiculously unfamiliar at first but later on, I realize that what the hey — might as well be happy. It works,” she wrote.
I never confronted that metaphor of the world as a glass of water – is it half full or half empty? Who does, tell me? When you’re in your 20s you’re still brimming with vim and tenacity that no one will ever rain on your parade. The world was moving on fast-forward mode. It was all or nothing in anything and everything. On hindsight, two decades later, realization hits you that you’ve been viewing the glass as half empty all along. Everything was not how it should be. Dissatisfaction easily settled on your psyche like dust sweeping through the crevices. The world owed you so much. Never satisfied with one’s accomplishments and one’s being, you desired another’s goal, station and existence.
Isn’t it funny about hindsight? It’s an epiphany that, if at all possible, should happen at the beginning of things and not at the end, but if that happened then it wouldn’t be an epiphany. Naturally, the only recourse you have, if it’s at all possible again, is to kick yourself for having blinders like a horse.
Scaling the 30s, the world slowed down a bit but it was still a half-empty glass accompanied with hindsight that never really gets noticed. It stays in the mind, consciously pushed to all the corners. The vim and tenacity have lessened with bitterness and determination taking the lead. The bastards who broke your heart should do more than cry you a river. Co-workers whose vacuity catapulted them up the ladder of success should be conned to the depths of Hades’ lair. Friends who left you in the cold should feel the pangs of pain a hundred fold.
Stepping into 40, hindsight no longer takes the backseat. It walks to centre stage and more than tweaks your perspective of the world. That e-mail made me face my glass – is it half empty or half full? That my family is safe from harm; that my sibling is living a part of her dreams; that my true friends are an e-mail or a phone call away; that I am a survivor of a battered heart, soul and mind; that I am of service to people; and that I am able to imagine myself happy, travelling and loving – my glass is certainly half full (even, I suppose, more than half full).
Simplify and Breathe 