A man with NO strings Attached

On the 6th of Jan 5 months ago I turned 20, I would like to take this opportunity to write about my journey as a child to a young adult. Until now, I have changed my residence about 5 or 6 times and not to mention the number of schools I have changed. The city where I live now, is not the city where I was born, that city is completely different. Moreover the place where I spent my early childhood years is different from the place where I spent my early teens. I always wondered how people feel when they live in the city where they are born, because I am completely alien to that feeling. All in all, I feel no longing for any place, because the place where I’m now maybe be the place where I might not be few years from now. When you change places or cities so frequently, you don’t actually have a constant group of friends, they always change as you move from one place to another.

As far as I can remember I’m used to spending time alone, not that I can’t make friends, but the high that I get exploring things on my own is a different experience altogether. Whenever people ask me about where I was from, the question automatically turns to why did you change cities. I’m  tired of giving people explanation for such trivial things. But this is my journey through this 20 years, I can say that for all these years I have lived a life of nomad. I have no affiliated group of friends because they always change, but one thing that I don’t feel is the sense of belonging to a place. This feeling is missing in my head, whenever I hear people say that we are going to move to a different city, they make a huge fuzz of it, they talk about how they are going to miss their friends, for me I’m like “meh, that’s fine let’s see what this city has to offer to me”. Since I have this missing gene for a sense of belonging, I have this highly evolved ability to adjust to my surrounding. All those people who are always changing cities will get this feeling. But we nomads develop this ability to explore the place where we stay, because that might  not be where we will be in a next couple of years.

 

I couldn’t resist myself from drawing this amazing Ultron reference! 😀

As I near the final days of being not a graduate, it is clear to me that for my higher education I’m definitely going to change cities or maybe states. In all this I learned one thing, adapt to your new surroundings and the transition will be much easier. As I have said before for people like me, we know the true meaning  of change is the only constant, because literally for us that is TRUE.  Sometimes life wants you to learn certain lessons, way before you are aware of your conscience. Maybe the life of nomad was the ultimate way of life telling me that YOU ARE BORN FOR THIS. 🙂

An Incomplete Intact C(h)ord

As we sat on the dinner table laughing ourselves to the jokes told by my dad, in the midst of all the jokes and witty comebacks, he hit an emotional chord in me, he said, “When I see you (me) and your ways, I see a past of me lingering with me, and what you see in me, is future standing in front of you”. What he said made me think about both of us, our ways, habits, peculiarities, etc. as everybody knows, we are nothing but a reflection of our parents, at the same time we see in our parents our future selves. As it goes in everybody’s’ family, me and my dad disagree on many things, and have polar opposite views on preferences of food, habits, we are similar in many ways than I can imagine.

My dad is an accomplished teacher, professor, scientist; he too has his shortcomings, while on the other hand I too have my own set of weaknesses. These shortcomings of both of us are the same, rather I should say similar. My dad being a professor has overcome his shortcomings in time, but on the other hand I’m still haunted by my demons. My demons are my shyness, my inability to explain myself properly and clearly to others, and my hyper negative habit of criticizing myself too often. As the whole story goes my dad too accepted these problems when he was a guy like me, and won over these problems overtime, but it signifies and vindicates one important thing- we are our reflection of our parents and things we inherit from them not just good traits, but their demons as well. The same way with my mom, I have successfully inherited her ability to be a writer (she is a freelance writer and professor), at the same time I too have inherited her demon- her I-completely-trust-you attitude which is a setback in this 21^st century.

A sweet childhood photograph of me and my dad which I hold close to my heart, a past and future reflection indeed!

Another thing I noticed along this way is that we always live in our past or our future, the reason behind this is quite clear now, we never really come face-to-face with our present self, we either are told by our parents that we are their past reflection or we are told that they are the reflection of our future. Against all this cliché, this goes, we are meant to live the present as it is a gift presented to us, but on the contrary we find ourselves thinking about the past or the future. We are either regretting or worrying despite. What we see in our parents and what they see in us(youngsters), is just the universe’s way of telling us that we are incomplete in our own ways, and mending ourselves is a difficult task all-in-all. Being incomplete is how this universe is telling us to live our life presently. In short this universe is a visionary, he is giving us a chance to exorcise our demons, and be a fuller versions of our better self, which lies somewhere in the middle awaiting to be discovered.