Year Recap, Part 3: Lessons

My grandfather died when I was very young. The last thing I can remember about him was when he took me to a toy shop in India. I don't remember him, or the shop, but I have a vague recollection of the toy he bought me. It was a small red firetruck. I have no idea where it is now. We no longer own the house that he lived in, so chances are I will never see it again. He was very ill at this point. So ill, in fact, that my dad got rather upset with him for leaving the house. He probably knew better too. I think he just wanted to spend time with me. To see what his grandson was like before it was too late.

But of course, how I acted when I was four was not a good indicator of what I would become. I'm told he went to an astrologer and asked for my destiny. He got some very specific predictions. The highlights were: I would get good grades in school from 1998 to 2003, I would move back to India at age 44, and I would become a famous writer.

When these predictions were first shown to me, I laughed. At the time I was probably around eight years old - I hated writing. I thought math and reading were pretty cool, but writing was definitely not something I would ever want to do. I had no comment on the grades prediction; how do you get good grades when you're eight? As for the idea of me moving back to India? That too seemed like complete rubbish. I liked it in the US, and in those days we actually visited India regularly. I was often reminded of how poor and simple a life my family led back in India by comparison.

Now, I still don't believe in those predictions. I don't have much faith in Astrology, or any method of telling the future really. But it's kind of strange to realize how much closer I am to that fate than I thought I'd be. The fact that I found it hilarious ten years ago and consider it a possible future now just goes to show that we really have no idea where we're heading.

To think that we know so little about what is going to happen to us is an uncomfortable idea, at least to me. As much as I appreciate a little surprise and unpredictability, I much prefer what I call a 'stable' lifestyle. One where we can get a sense of what's going to happen tomorrow. A lifestyle where we do have a good idea of what next year might bring and who we might be then.

And that stability is rooted in the people we surround ourselves with. Our longtime friends. Those people keep us from drastically changing in a matter of days. We don't do this because their support means so much to us, and their friendship is worth it. There are good and bad sides to this. If you choose poorly, you're locked into those choices.

But with each passing day I grow more and more certain that I chose well. That I have friends that support me, and that they're people worth supporting. The challenge that this year brought was one of distance. I was separated from my closest friends by hundreds of miles. At the beginning of the year I wasn't sure how to deal with it. I once noted out of frustration, "I never realized, or maybe I have just forgotten, what a luxury it is to say 'see you tomorrow.'"

But, at the risk of sounding horribly cliche, that's life. I realize now that I'm probably never going to live within walking distance of my best friend. Where your friends are never gets to dictate where you go. We just have to learn to live with that.

There is lots of learning to be done, in fact. Sometimes I skip out on dinner with floormates so I can stay online a little bit longer. I often stay up until unreasonable hours talking to people. I spend more time than is necessary on this blog, one of my strongest connections to my friends who went to TJ.

And there is still more learning for me to do. How to balance my time spent with friends I can see every day and friends I'll only see on the computer screen at best. How to hold onto funny little things all day and relate them at night instead of immediately turning to my right and blurting it out. How to make the most of the shorter amounts of time I can spend talking to them. I'm still working on all those things.

Some day, sooner than I'm willing to acknowledge, the friends I've made at CMU will be in the same boat as my friends from TJ. And hopefully by then I'll be better at this. But I thank you guys for standing by me as I leave the computer at arbitrary times, forget to respond to emails, and almost never answer my phone. I'm really quite bad at it, but I'm striving to get better. I hope to keep in touch with every one of you, because you all are such an important part of who I am.

So, here's to stability that lasts a lifetime.

Cheers,

Ved