Against The Wind

I feel it somewhere deep down inside. I’m no longer the person I used to be. I’m also not the person I thought I’d turn out to be. And I no longer dare to imagine just what kind of person I will be in the future.

Have you ever tried defining yourself? Have you ever thought how highly (or lowly) your sense of self is?

I’m not so sure about things anymore. Sometimes it feels as if my confidence has been slowly but surely eroding. Slow enough for me not to realize it when it happens, but surely enough that eventually I do.

Last week was Father’s Day. I sat across my dad as we gathered for dinner, all 10 of us from both sides of the family. It was the restaurant that my father first introduced to us when we were teenagers. My brother and I were going on and on about the fond memories we had eating Indian food for the first time. He was mostly silent throughout the night. I glanced at him. I caught him looking around the table, looking at everyone, thinking something. I asked what it was. He just smiled and said nothing.

But I knew that look. It was the kind of look he had when he started feeling rather philosophical about life. I knew it well because I am like that too.

Perhaps he was trying to define himself too. Perhaps he too felt that he was no longer the person he thought he was, nor the person he thought he would be. And in that moment, I saw more of my father in myself that I ever did before. We are the product of our parents in more ways that we are willing to acknowledge.

The more I live this life, the more it feels like being placed on a current in the ocean. You can paddle and navigate through the seas, but you are still bound to the winds in the sky and currents in the sea. You learn to maneuver through it to get you where you want to go, but you also learn to accept and surrender to where it will actually bring you. And that includes the things you achieve in life, as well as the person you end up becoming.

I looked across the table at my mother. My gaze softens. I’ve always felt a special bond with her. How has her life turned out? Certainly not the way she hoped it too either. Could she ever see herself losing her husband within ten hears of marriage, living ill and alone for another fifteen before finally finding peace again? Some days when I bring her to church, she feels embarrassed to meet the friends from her youth. While many have gone on to become successful people with happy homes, here she is living the remnants of a broken marriage and mental illness. Knowing this, I think I overcompensate by being unusually protective of her when out in public, and I try hard to be a son she can be proud of.

Then I look at my own life, my wife, my marriage, my family. And I wonder… in fear… just how things will turn out. I no longer trust myself enough to be able to make things OK just by sheer will power, by sheer belief. I realize that this is not how the life works out.

The one thing that has greatly developed in me over the past year or two, is that of HOPE.

I have come to learn the delicate but unyieldinge nature of hope. Time magazine was featuring an in depth article about the science of hope. It talks about how people are often optimistic about their future. They often imagine themselves being more successful that they eventually do turn out. And the only people who predict the future to a more reasonable level of accuracy... are those who are mildly depressed. And yet, people do continue to believe they will not end up like others no matter what the statistics say. Case in point would be marriage. With divorce rates escalating everywhere..the percentage of people taking the vows believing that they will divorce is ZERO. I think it has to do with the indomitable spirit of human beings. We refuse to submit to hopelessness even in the most dire of situations. We need hope, like how we need air and water. We need hope, like how we need love and faith.

This is the place I have found myself in recent times. That air of confidence; that belief that with my talents, with my skills, with who I am, with all that I have, I will carve something for myself in this life – that has died away. In its place is a spring of hope; one that comforts me in my weakest moment, one that keeps me humble in my strongest ones, one that fuels me on as I find myself running against the wind, searching and searching again for myself.

I guess that's what I am at this moment in time... searching and searching again for myself.....against the wind... with a lot less self confidence, but with a lot more hope.

Cheers to you friend.

I began to find myself searchin'
Searching for shelter again and again
Against the wind
A little something against the wind
I found myself seeking shelter against the wind 
Bob Seger - Against the Wind