Past is called the past for a reason. It signifies something that we have experienced but notice the emphasis on “experienced”. Meaning, it is never going to be repeated again; under any circumstances. Now man is a curious animal. For the first twenty-five odd years of his life, he spends his life anticipating “the future” and when that future is reached (not necessarily achieved) he feels lost. We don’t know what to do when we reach that crucial point in life, called the middle age, arguably the most controversial of all stage of life. Where our past is gone, finished, done with; and our future, the one that glares brightly in our face, is the future we never anticipated! Let’s face it. We never thought we’d get old, dependent or grey; it was not what we signed up for. We thought we’d stay forever young, forever capable, and forever beautiful. And then suddenly life meets us at this unimaginably ugly little place, called the middle age. It’s the point where our past is still so fresh in our minds that we want to run towards it, hoping to catch it somehow, to bring it back. We don’t want to our youth to abandon us. We struggle to say goodbye to our beauty. But the more we try to resist the more we move away from the remnants of what we once were. We become jealous, fiercely so; even bitter. We feel wronged by Mother Nature herself, when she always showed us all the signs. We saw our parents growing old in front of us and our grandparents die. One by one. But we never thought we’d get old as well.
But it is our choice. It is our choice to remain bitter or to make something out of the inevitable self that WILL meet us sometime in future, to meet it in grace. And no, it is not as easy as those self-help books sometimes suggest. It is a constant struggle everyday, every minute, every second. It is keeping the guards up against all the negativity that will confront us. It is to turn it away, it is to rise and shine. It is to embrace who I am, and embrace the fact that I am growing older. To stop reminiscing about what’s gone and to start anticipating the future.
Always. Anticipating the future.
Wajiha Hyder 