Sam looked around himself as he sat on a lonely park bench at the corner of the vast, neatly mown lawn on a cold Tuesday evening. The park was teeming with people, young and old. There were children running around, falling every now and then, with smiles on their faces. Their parents watched on, delighted. A few people jogged around the lawn in circles while listening to music, oblivious to their immediate surroundings. Wind steadily blew through the rustling leaves above Sam’s head. The noise made him feel at peace. He pushed his jet black hair off his forehead as he asked himself the burning question.
“What do I want to do with my life?”
He had recently finished his last year at school, and these questions had begun to pop into his head. Whenever he had such dilemmas, Sam always thought of his parents. In his opinion, they had done everything right. They were his ultimate inspiration. A tear slowly rolled down his cheek, closely followed by another. As he wiped them off with the sleeve of his shirt, he remembered the vivid details of that terrible day. He had been in the car with both his parents when the truck had collided with it. He had survived. His parents hadn’t. He remembered how he had crawled out of the upturned car, puncturing the skin of his elbows on the shattered glass all over the road. He remembered having tried to pull his parents out of the car. He remembered having been forcibly tugged away from the car by a policeman, moments before it burst into flames. He remembered having cried himself to sleep every night for the next three weeks. He had lived with his Aunt and Uncle ever since, and they took care of him like he was their own.
As he thought of his parents, a very distinct piece of their advice came to his mind. They always made him understand how important it was to do what made him happy. That was more important than doing what paid well, or what “most people” did. Keeping this in mind, Sam made an important alteration to the burning question.
“What can I do with my life that’ll make me happy?”
As the evening progressed, it got colder by the minute. Sam dug both his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and was able to see his breath. He got up from the bench and walked to another part of the park. A part that people rarely visited, due to its gloomy atmosphere. It was a long, concrete walkway, with trees on either side that met at the top to form a canopy. Only a little sunlight managed to push its way through the leaves to the floor beneath the canopy. Sam looked down at the ground right in front of his feet as he steadily paced forward. He continued to think about the burning question. “What can I do with my life that’ll make me happy?” He wasn’t getting any satisfactory answers. He started to feel frustrated, and soon started to panic. He started to ask himself more unsettling questions like what would happen if he never figured his future out, and if he had no plans whatsoever.
He stopped walking for a minute and calmed himself down. Then something hit him. The walkway was a reflection of his predicament and his life itself. He was too busy looking directly in front of his feet as he walked, that he had no idea where the walkway actually led. Thinking he had found the solution to his problem, Sam looked up and strained his eyes to see where the walkway ended. He couldn’t see that far ahead. It seemed to snake on for an infinite distance. This gave Sam an inexplicable feeling of anxiety, and he started to run as fast as he could, to try and see where the walkway ended. He ran until his muscles screamed for respite and then ran some more, until he tripped over a crack in the concrete floor and crashed into the ground, face first.
Sam groaned in pain as he turned around and lay on his back. He had broken his nose, and he felt the steady trickle of blood down the side of his face. He simply lay on the floor for a few minutes, staring at the dome of leaves overhead. “What was I thinking,” he mumbled to himself. As he got up, off the floor, ignoring the profuse bleeding from his nose, he smiled smugly. He had the answer to the burning question.
The walkway was indeed a reflection of his predicament. He realized first that he had been looking only at the ground right in front of his feet, the immediate future, and that he didn’t really look at the bigger picture, even though he kept asking himself about it. He had then tried to see where the walkway led, even though it was past the threshold of his eyesight, and had foolishly done the deed of giving too much attention to the bigger picture that he forgot to pay attention to that present moment. Because of this, he didn’t notice the crack in the floor.
He realized that there was no way he could predict exactly what his future was going to be like, no matter how hard he tried to plan it. The walkway would continue to snake beyond visibility. All in all, he realized that the answer to his question was this: He didn’t have to have a plan for everything. It wasn’t absolutely imperative that he knew everything that was to occur in the future. He mustn’t try to look so far into the future that he forgets to enjoy that present moment. At the same time, not spending any time thinking about the future wasn’t the best idea either. The key to success was to strike a balance between the two.
Sam maintained the smile for a while, and continued to walk down the road, wiping some blood off his nose. He held his head high, and did not look back for even a minute. After all, whether or not he could see his future, the past was past.
The Perennial Daydreamer 