Specific period(s) in one’s life that the need of assessment prevails is what defines the crossroads our life journey inescapably contains. Someone might be (un)lucky enough as not to have any such stop in their path, and some other, like myself, are quite often found on such crossroads that seek assessment of goals, wishes, ambitions, and real life values.
In light of achieving ambitions, people often neglect other important dimensions of life which seem to have an expiration date. The ambition to reach success at the earliest age, fulfill expectations before embarking on the boat of real life, or simply deciding upon your goals without considering the different levels of influence and importance of specific constituent dimensions of life itself, most of the time assigns us a path without many crossroads but with unfortunately few quite painful ones. Some wise man has said that taking the short path is most of the time not a good solution, because one’s path is constructed in such a way that each stop, crossroad or bump on the road contributes to the better attainment of the meaning of life and to the endurance of strength to move on. In taking short paths, we leave out people, places, memories that would have made life colorful and playful. It happens often that the people and common experiences we left in our last stop are not there anymore in the next one.
The common misunderstanding is the assumption that the world will freeze at the point we have decided to follow our ambitions (and to a certain point selfish goals) and it will de-freeze once we come to the next stop.
Reality-check: same as our life’s dynamism didn’t stop from the last crossroad we had, so didn’t other people’s lives. And it might just happen that they experienced few crossroads and in one of them realized that you don’t fit anymore in their conception of life or aren’t needed anymore amongst the people who are of value in their lives. So, having this in mind, I ask, was it worth it?
Was taking a short leap and neglecting assessments of your ambitions and goals worth of losing the people that you mutually cared for? In answering this question, most would say that the reason why someone isn’t part of our lives now is because s/he never was important enough so as to be part of it in the first place. I consider such an answer as coward, stupid and quite unrealistic.
- Coward because of the fear that one has to face the wrong decision of putting aside the connections and relationships with people for a trivial aim of success, which, if not cherished in a community you feel comfortable in, is not important and relevant anymore.
- Stupid because it allows for a simple conclusion to a rather complex issue, especially since the people opting out from the picture of your future life aren’t doing so with no reason, specifically not without you being the one to forcefully make them do so by valuing them less than they were worth of.
- Unrealistic because deep down you know that’s not the real reason and saying that they weren’t worth of being part of your life if not there anymore is just a way of camouflaging your pain.
Further on, was sacrificing one element of your life worth of attainment of the other one? If that was the right choice, way to go… good decisions is what structures life and makes its worth elevated. But, what if the sacrifice wasn’t worth of? What if even though successfully attaining an element in life, the element of life you sacrificed was so important that makes your success just too insignificant? It is important to note that, second chances are rare things in life, third ones miracles, fourth ones don’t even exist in theory let alone in practice. Thus assessment of goals, ambitions and expectations in a recurrent frequency is always more than welcome if we are to make the maximum out of our lives.
Back to my own story… I have noticed that there is something special with the number 23, which I cannot explain, that makes my current crossroad important, challenging, meaningful yet empty and desperate. I used to think of the age interval of 20-25 as part of the teenage years, not even imaginable part of adulthood. That mainly because I had put forward to myself the wish to follow ambitions and at an early age achieve success beyond my own limitations. Being constantly student, according to my previous theory, would allow for the continuation of my teenage years, thus putting the process of maturity and adulthood on hold. As many other assumptions in my life, this one as well turned out to be inconsistent with my realities. Finding myself at the crossroad of assessment, I realized that selfishly enough, I had thought of my life dynamics in the light of myself only, disregarding the existence of people around me, who in one or another way have made my ambitions worth having and pursuing. In every single phase of change and attainment of goals, it seems that I lose more than what I gain, making the cost-benefit analysis result in a negative figure. Surely, in each of these stages I tend to meet new people and have new experiences, and more importantly, I tend to fulfill the aims set out before, but it turns out that most of what I gain and lose during the same process results in 0. However, that isn’t the final result, because by trying out my ambitions, I tend to lose important details in lives of people that have made my endeavors worth taking, which later turns the 0 into a negative figure. Leaving out the mathematic scheme of my life, surprisingly I find that at the age of 23 I feel old, over-used by my own aims, and regretful to so many things I planned to do but which would have made my life at 30 seem as coming to an end. I recently realized that maybe instead of putting my social and community life on hold on expense of achieving the educational goals, I should do the opposite. If I won’t have the people who should enjoy the fruits of my success around, I would be nothing more than a prisoner of my intelligence, looking down at the little things that make people happy in life such as simple chats, random meet ups, unplanned experiences. The train of life bounties seems to have specific stations on quite precise times…once you miss the one train, it will be some time until you get to catch it again. However, once you are late in catching a train, it will always follow the same pattern of such failure because trains of life bounties are perfectly timed in life…once you depart from one train there is immediately another train waiting. It certainly gives hope that once you get in the first train, it follows that you will have another train to catch immediately after… the only problem is that you can never guess on what train you have previously missed!
