Aspirations...

People forget often what they want out of life. I know because I myself am guilty. But I think it is part of life to be diverted into side roads before we finish our main journey. Otherwise life would be nothing more than a one sided affair. It’s the side roads that color our lives and remind us about our goals when we feel like slipping away.

As trekkers in this journey called life, we need to have a goal in mind. Without one, it is like boarding a boat without a destination. This goal is our lighthouse beacon –something to guide our way that will keep us anchored and focused. And it does not matter whether we reach it in the end – the important thing is that we have one.

Truth be told, I never really had one for the better part of twenty years. Youth has a way of muddling up the details in the moment and thoughts like these kind of make life uninteresting. After all as young kids, nobody wanted to live a structured life. We hated the boorish lives that our parents lived and we promised ourselves that we wouldn’t fall on to the same traps that we saw them fall into….

Adulthood changed that, of course. It was expected in a way, but nevertheless, it was rather deflating to realize how cold and rigidly structured the world is.

Everyone of us have this vision of what he or she wants in this life. It can take many forms. Mostly, it has something to do with a lifestyle – we all want to be happy. Mostly, this takes a rather hazy notion – no one knows his or her version of happiness yet at ones teenage and early young adulthood years. It only takes on a concrete form when we finally grow up…

Mostly it takes the form of a family – particularly for those of Asian descent. Having a family as our happiness goal is ingrained in our cultures. Without one, we think of life as incomplete. It starts with certain stages… love comes to mind.

As youngsters, we dream of falling in love with the ‘one’ and fighting the world to be with the one we most desire. I think everyone is allowed to do that: to fall in love and be in love…

To fight and cry and to feel that tingle when you gaze into the eyes of your beloved – to fight with him or her and feel your heart race when she is near… to spend sleepless nights dreaming of what your lives can be.  Everyone deserves to feel that once in a lifetime kick that would color our lives in hues that would never be felt again…

…at least till reality sets in and we become more somber and mature (and our vision of the world becomes less colorful, haha…)

And then it’s on to the next stage… and you know what it is.

Children…

Whether we consider them to be the continuation of the dreams we could not realize in our lifetimes or whether they are the fruits of a love between a husband and a wife or (hehe) it might be the result of a moment’s lapse in judgment, it does not matter – children are the next step.

Children makes us forget the madness of juvenile love (or a forced marriage of convenience) or hehe, unrequited love or something like that… People who were once so conscious of their bodies or how they looked start to find out that parenthood changes them in ways that they never imagined (hehe) and priorities change…

People live for their children whether they like it or not, whether they choose it or not… Even the bad parents live for their children…

And then the years pass by like a fast train and the realities of age finally creep up to catch up with everyone of us. Children grow up and we become grandparents and we finally settle into retirement.

And then the hope is we find that happiness we searched for. Not something specific but something general – a concept… much like how love or falling in love is a concept. Happiness is this…

Which brings me to the initial statement of this piece…

Not everyone has this as his goal in life. Everyone wants it of course, whether professed or secretly wished for….

Mine is a farm in the middle of the woods somewhere with my books and my dog. I nearly missed that in the rush of things in this life… and it took a visit to the clinic and a reality check on the state of my body to remind me of this.