Paths

Do you ever look back at your life and wonder, "how did things end up this way"?

I have.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd end up in the exact same position I am now. Things have changed that I never thought possible. But here I am.

Some things didn't turn out how I wanted them to. And some things turned out much better.

So many people have come and gone. So many dreams have waxed and waned.

The uncertainty I was feeling not too long ago is gone. My future is at my fingertips. But somehow there's an emptiness to it.

How was the journey here? Who did I hurt? Who did I love? Did I do the right thing?

Hell, I don't know. Can anyone ever be so sure of what life's going to throw at them? I certainly tried to do the right thing the whole time. Can I say for certain that I did?

No.

All those people that you just fell out of touch with for one reason or another but wish you could still talk to. All those important and difficult decisions you made. All those relationships you maintained. All that you worked for.

All the bridges you built. All the bridges you burned.

All that stress that you wish you could have made go away. All the times when you knew you could have been doing something better with your time. All the times you didn't understand why someone acted the way they did. All the times you made the wrong decisions and tried to make things right. All the things you're not proud of. All the hearts you broke you didn't mean to... and all the times your heart was broken.

Did you do the right thing?

I really don't know if I did.

One thing I know for sure:

I tried.

From "Recollections of Early Childhood"

"What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind..."

-William Wordsworth

"Why Orwell Matters"

"But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them"

From Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens

Mirror, Mirror...

"But genius, and even great talent, springs less from the seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth's surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected."

-Marcel Proust: Within a Budding Grove. Taken from Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens.