Saturday, February 11, 2006

If you had fun and you know it clap your hands

There are certain periods in your life that you know you'll always remember. Times when, despite all the comfort zones you've drawn around yourself and the self-content lassitude you enjoy in them, you find yourself thrown into a situation where there is no longer as much security, and yet this imposed state of startling instability is something you realise to be enjoyable, even as you tear your hair out in despair at the problems that face you.

It is a period of inner growth. You plumb inner depths and discover what you can or cannot do. You see how people really respond in this new environment, and from a detached place also observe how you respond, and you learn about the nature of other people and yourself. Veils of naivete are torn from your eyes, and you come to realise perhaps not everything can be as perfect as you would like them to be, and you learn to live with the furthest you can come to perfection within imperfection.

Some people surprise you, delightfully. You get to know people you have only always known as a face and a name, and it makes you happy to be thus acquainted. People you have known, you start to know even deeper, and sometimes that is not such a good thing. Even in yourself, you find that faced with these new changes, you are starting to change, and worry that you are changing for the worse, not the better. People test you to your limits, those who are always around a lot more so than those who are not, and some push you over finally, quietly, without knowing it. And for you, things will never be the same.

You become in awe of the persons who lead with such effortless skill, and understand that there are people who were born to lead and others who were born to follow, even as the followers may aspire towards their leaders although they understand that they may never arrive at that Olympian ideal. It is something to respect and to strive towards. You wonder at the perfect combination of time, place and person at the nexus of chance that presented such a fortuitously enjoyable time for you, while for others it may not have been such joy, and you are deeply grateful for this quirk of probability, when you think of all the horrible things that could have happened and did not.

All good things come to an end, and the ending is never easy, just as beginnings are never exciting. To a person in a dark room with a lone candle to see by, the dwindling of the candle makes him realise how precious that short period of illumination was, and he looks longingly as the flame wastes away, leaving the lingering shadow of white against his vision as he is plunged into darkness yet again. The heart aches with a longing for that time, and yet it is precisely this longing that makes that time more precious, for if it were to last forever surely you would tire of it and hope for it to end. A short time, filled with memories, stays effortlessly in the mind to be savoured again and again. For as long as you live, it will remain.

No matter how cynical you are, the time fills you with an optimism that plans which seem like a waste of time at the beginning, which are criticised by others, can be meaningful plans that leave everlasting memories. You are glad that at least you can be one of the people to tell future generations how wonderful this time was, how memorable, and not one of those who would condemn it as a futile effort or mindless boredom.

At the end of it all, you feel no words can express what you feel and yet you want to express them anyway, however clumsily you can, because it is rare that you are so moved. If there's only one thing you want to say, after all the long paragraphs you've written, it is this. "Thank you for the good times."

Avaris / 2/11/2006 01:07:00 PM

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