How to live and love life

 

For a very long time, I cannot help but wonder, how am I supposed to live my life? It is amazing how much one year can change things. I have seen a lot of death, tears, drama, emotional roller-coaster, and also love in this one year than in my entire life before. I am usually very confident and very sure of what I am doing, what I want to do, what I have chosen to do, regardless what other people think of my actions. But now, I am not. I am experiencing one of those few moments of my life when I truly do not know what I should do, how I should be living my life.

I feel like I am at a crossroad, staring out at different paths set out in front of me. I have to choose or the doors to all the paths will soon close on me. I feel like I am stuck in my current situation because I am very fickle-minded now. I am not so sure of anything anymore. I do not know what is really right and what is really wrong. The things that I had believed in, I am not sure of them now. I am lost once again.

I have been observing my own emotions, mood, thoughts and people around me. I feel moody and depressed because I feel at times very helpless. I do not know how to get myself out of the situation I am in. I see people doing things, going on with their lives with such surety and confidence. At times, I wonder if they are just as fallible, like me, who will experience bouts of uncertainty, anxiety and helplessness in their life and how their life is going to be.

Maybe I belong to a lost generation – a generation that perpetually live in moments of uncertainty maybe because we have been living in relatively peaceful environment such that we are unable to vent our human nature to worry on things that should matter (like life and death). So we started getting nervous and anxious at every single thing.

Maybe because I have been living a privileged life. While I do not come from well to do family and have to pay for my own tertiary education, I have a complete and happy family life. My parents are around, my siblings are all university graduates and holding down stable jobs. While my parents are already in old age, I am very grateful that they are still with me everyday. I have friends who lost at least one of their parents at an early age. The pain and loss – I can only imagine. But maybe because I have been having such a privileged life, with people surrounding me, with people loving me (most of the time), that when shit things happen, non-monetary shit things happen, I lost my footing and felt like I am losing everything. I grew dramatic, emotional, unsure of myself even more because people criticize me for reacting the way I am reacting. I felt indignant about their criticisms as I felt that they were judging me unfairly. It led me to realize that sometimes, I had also been in their shoes too, judging people for their actions without being compassionate to them or giving them the benefit of doubt.

I remember one of the lessons from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – the lessons of life that you have to learn will keep coming back, no matter where you escape to, until you finally decide to face the lessons and learn them. Maybe he was right. The life lessons I have been escaping and refusing to face up to, are now back to haunt me in a different form. Perhaps, now is time I start to face them straight-on and learn the lessons. Until I learn them, I will continue to be stuck in this spot and unable to move forward. I need to face them and I need to learn them. I need to move forward and stop looking back. Look forward and step by step at my own pace.