For the greater part of my life I’d been around my parents and friends. I’d never really had the chance of being on my own. Attended school travelling from home ‘cause it was close by and the same went for college as well…. So when I got my first job, it was my first shot at living on my own and oddly to my surprise I was not at all sad about the long periods of time I’d have to spend far away from home and all of those places and people I knew and who knew me. The workplace brought with it many new things - people from various parts of the country, different languages, tastes, schools of thought, view points, concepts and perceptions, and a host of other things and in the middle of it all I made a whole lot of friends, had a lot of fun and enjoyed life to the hilt. Then a day came which brought with it feelings of being numb & sad and pangs of heartache and waves of pain, training had come to an end and it was time for us to take up our positions at our assigned places of posting and that was the first time I felt emotions seething in me. Rivers of tears flowed and joined seas of frustration at being unable to do anything about being posted in different locations.
Slowly and steadily, that hurt and broken heart learnt to let go and those chapped and drooping lips learnt to smile. The new place brought with it, like some time back, a bunch of new people and a gamut of new experiences and a heart that once swore not to grow emotionally attached to anybody/thing found itself getting entangled in a web of love and laughter. There are categories of people in one’s life that seldom have occupants – “TRUE Friends”, “TRUE Love” etc. And when you begin finding people you can add into those groups it is an amazing feeling. One feels like one has a meaning to one’s life, like there is a value to one’s existence. One begins living and stops existing. And then as one begins to savor the moment, history, as cruel as it is, snatches it away and repeats itself.
Yet again my heart endures pains and agonies, once long forgotten, with time raking up old wounds. I realize that I truly miss those who miss me and that I really did have people, whom I could call TRUE Friends who TRULY Love me. Each day seems either as boring as a task that has to be done or like an ordeal which one must endure.
It is true that life is a learning experience, in that it changes a person over its entire course. A person is like a rock on the river bed. At first it may be coarse and rough with rugged edges and being jaggedly shaped but with time the river smoothens the rock and turns it into a beautiful round pebble. The river of experiences a person experiences throughout his life change him and so have these experiences in my life. From being a completely, in my own words, “Hard Hearted” person to being a person who cries and laughs and gets angry, I have changed and I have surprised myself with these changes in me. I’m always in awe of how time and life have their way with people and the way which the human being in us learns to make the right choice. At the end of it all it all, it ironically sounds like those lines from a Limp Bizkit song – “Life is a lesson, you learn it when you’re through!”
