This is not the first time I am writing about this, and this probably will not be the last. On my 27th birthday, I wrote a post titled “The Wasteland of Dreams”, in which I listed all the things I could have done or should have done, but did not do. And that wasn’t the first post of its kind, like I mentioned.
In truth, we all just have too many things we want to do. At least, there’s me blogging about it and ranting it out. But I know people who woefully tell me how they have hit a pause button on life to massage the tired legs and feet of their mothers-in-law. Nope, I am not saying massaging your mother-in-law’s tired feet is wrong. But at the cost of your own joy? Still giving me that judgmental face? Let me put it in a culturally (pointlessly) people pleasing way. There used to be a BlackBerry ad that used to go, “Do what you love. Love what you do.” Anyway, no digressing, cos I have my own share of “I wish”’s and my only woe at this moment is that I can talk only about three of them! Here goes:
- Some of you know that I used to own a guitar once upon a time. I bought it when I was twenty-three, impulsively one morning, when I felt “too old” and about to “die without having done a single thing worth putting up on my tombstone.” Call it the earliest midlife crisis ever! After buying it, I stared at it. For a long and lovely hour. I touched it, and pulled back, as if afraid to hurt it. I tickled it. I did everything, except join a class and learn how to play it! At the time I thought, I’d save some money and join classes the next month. This happened quite a few times, and then later that year I got married. Later still I became a mom, and the guitar still lay, untouched, unlearned and un-played. Unable to bear my guitar’s silence and the dust it was collecting in a corner, I sold it. As impulsively as I had bought it. I wish I had joined the classes as impulsively too, without thinking so much about my savings. Even now I wish, if I could turn back time and go back to the day I bought it, I would march right down to the guitar learning classes!
- There were a lot of weekends that went by with me doing nothing. Figuratively speaking. I caught up on lost sleep, did my laundry, watched the billboard top 50 on YouTube, but effectively nothing. I so wish instead of lying on the couch all day, I had met up with friends and gone somewhere. Travel needn’t be touristy or fancy. It’s a shame that despite having lived in Bangalore for almost six years I haven’t seen much of Karnataka. So, while it is a long vacation I truly yearn for, I wish I could spend every weekend going somewhere and exploring! Then at least a Monday morning wouldn’t feel like such a drag. There was a study conducted that found out most people took sick leaves on Fridays simply because they could not decide what to wear!! I have my own theory that Monday blues happen simply because you cannot answer the simple question, “How was your weekend?”
- There are some things money can’t buy (for everything else there’s a bank balance that I dream of having someday *winks*). One of those things is focus. Every year, I start working on a writing project that I hope will someday be a full length novel. But after writing just one chapter, I simply lose focus. I just do not have the willpower to sit myself down, open that folder and continue. Trust me, that’s a whole lot of incomplete awesomeness that you all are missing out on *kidding*. But yeah, I wish, I just wish I could sit down right now and finish off at least one project in that one continuous sitting. Else, that’s just something I’ll put off forever, until there’ll be no more time left. Yeah, those are the somber lines of someone who had a midlife crisis at age twenty-three.
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” ~ Pablo Picasso
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