Miles to go before I sleep
Today,after a long awaited meeting with my undergrad gang,I was on the way back home when a friend texted me.
I reached home.
Although this is a perfectly innocuous statement to make,it was precisely the wrong moment for it.(Or perhaps the right.Depends on which way you look at it:P)
It was peak hour traffic at its worst and I was stuck at the same signal since ten minutes.As wonderful as the day was,it was also tiring.I also happened to be suffering from a lot of cumulative exhaustion. As a result,I was frustrated by this seemingly harmless statement.
It brought forth a mental tirade that should have actually occurred aeons ago.
Why is it that I'm always the farthest one from any place? Why is it that I always have to leave considering the time and its ramifications on traffic? I can never linger at any place--I always have to be the first to leave and yet the last to reach home. Why is it that I spend one sixth of my life in travel and at that in the most tiresome way possible?
School was 10km away and my parents dropped and picked me up punctually and tirelessly for a decade. When I think of pre University, the first thing I remember is how I used to struggle to travel the 13km. While everyone else bothered about entrance exams and how to clear them, I struggled with how to get anything done when I reached home at 11pm and left it at 6. Thereafter came 4 years of undergraduate life which were easy in every aspect except this one. After almost two decades, life saw fit to give me some respite in my graduate life. I only traveled when I went home and that drastically reduced in frequency because it entailed a four hour nightmare whose name was travel.
Now, I find myself in the clutches of my favorite fiend again--I'm spending 3 hours in getting from one place to the other which is just ridiculous.
What more do you want of me?
Drenched? Tick.
Stranded? Yes
Robbed? Affirmative
Lost? Positive
And a hundred other things that don't even bear thinking about leave alone talking. Are there any lessons left? Something you forgot to teach me?
When I whined about this to my Mom, she said, If you constantly find something repeating in your life, then the odds are that at some level you're wishing for it.
Wishing for this? You must be kidding me! Why would I?
But then, I thought about it. My attitude towards travel had been weird. I was thinking of it as something akin to karma. I took it in my stride and dealt with it, reasoning that one day, when my quota was done,it would go away. I took the hard ways out just because I was strong enough
But who was I proving a point to?I also told myself that there were people with worse predicaments and that I should be content with my lot. But if you start looking at life that way, aren't you resigning yourself to your troubles instead of trying to overcome them? Maybe there was some truth to what she said. I wasn't welcoming travel for sure, but I wasn't dead against it either.
Well, it's time to change that now. Listen to me, universe. I don't know if your damn law of attraction is true or not. Anyway, I'm done with this. I want no part of it.For life. The only miles I want to put in are on a nice vacation. :P The next time you're doling out travel favors,keep me in mind.
I reached home.
Although this is a perfectly innocuous statement to make,it was precisely the wrong moment for it.(Or perhaps the right.Depends on which way you look at it:P)
It was peak hour traffic at its worst and I was stuck at the same signal since ten minutes.As wonderful as the day was,it was also tiring.I also happened to be suffering from a lot of cumulative exhaustion. As a result,I was frustrated by this seemingly harmless statement.
It brought forth a mental tirade that should have actually occurred aeons ago.
Why is it that I'm always the farthest one from any place? Why is it that I always have to leave considering the time and its ramifications on traffic? I can never linger at any place--I always have to be the first to leave and yet the last to reach home. Why is it that I spend one sixth of my life in travel and at that in the most tiresome way possible?
School was 10km away and my parents dropped and picked me up punctually and tirelessly for a decade. When I think of pre University, the first thing I remember is how I used to struggle to travel the 13km. While everyone else bothered about entrance exams and how to clear them, I struggled with how to get anything done when I reached home at 11pm and left it at 6. Thereafter came 4 years of undergraduate life which were easy in every aspect except this one. After almost two decades, life saw fit to give me some respite in my graduate life. I only traveled when I went home and that drastically reduced in frequency because it entailed a four hour nightmare whose name was travel.
Now, I find myself in the clutches of my favorite fiend again--I'm spending 3 hours in getting from one place to the other which is just ridiculous.
What more do you want of me?
Drenched? Tick.
Stranded? Yes
Robbed? Affirmative
Lost? Positive
And a hundred other things that don't even bear thinking about leave alone talking. Are there any lessons left? Something you forgot to teach me?
When I whined about this to my Mom, she said, If you constantly find something repeating in your life, then the odds are that at some level you're wishing for it.
Wishing for this? You must be kidding me! Why would I?
But then, I thought about it. My attitude towards travel had been weird. I was thinking of it as something akin to karma. I took it in my stride and dealt with it, reasoning that one day, when my quota was done,it would go away. I took the hard ways out just because I was strong enough
But who was I proving a point to?I also told myself that there were people with worse predicaments and that I should be content with my lot. But if you start looking at life that way, aren't you resigning yourself to your troubles instead of trying to overcome them? Maybe there was some truth to what she said. I wasn't welcoming travel for sure, but I wasn't dead against it either.
Well, it's time to change that now. Listen to me, universe. I don't know if your damn law of attraction is true or not. Anyway, I'm done with this. I want no part of it.For life. The only miles I want to put in are on a nice vacation. :P The next time you're doling out travel favors,keep me in mind.
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