These days, I’ve been wondering about the steps I should have taken, the things I should have done, and the person I should have become.
But who gets a say in what kind of person you should be?
Perhaps because when I was young, I had this image in my head of a person that I had dreamt of becoming. And now, three decades into life, I wonder if I’ve already made peace with my young self, “Here I am now, just like where you hoped to be.”
Sure, I can now buy things my young self could only dream about. But at the same time, I still don’t have the flexibility I wish I had at this point in my life. I may have overestimated how things could develop in my lifetime.
But then again, I am living a better life. At least better than what I grew up in.
I am no celebrity, not a daughter of a business tycoon. No. I grew up in a low-income family, raised by a widow (which is already a disadvantage in the society I live in), and worked myself through scholarships to get through university.
So yes, prosperity may have come slowly, but my family and I have prospered nonetheless. I may not be able to write in detail how my life came to be, but I’m convinced the Lord has been working in the details of my life, too.
God, the unseen hand, is always in control of my seemingly insignificant, mundane life.
However, at times, when I feel that nothing has changed in my life, as if the same grip of poverty is choking all the good I am receiving, I have to remind myself that my circumstances are no longer the same.
And this excerpt from my current read reminded me that nothing stays the same except who we are, even when change seems to be the only real thing left.
I tried to convince myself that things change. It wasn’t that easy. Do things change? I had lived the same day for 3,352 days. It seemed proof that things don’t change.
But of course that was wrong. Nothing stays the same, not even life in the camp. We had formed study groups, classes, sports clubs, activity groups. We had made friends. We taught the children. People had been born, people had died. People had gotten married and divorced. Life had gone on in here. It wasn’t the case that things hadn’t changed, that time had stopped outright.
But there is change and there is change. Looking through the fence at the mountains, hazy in the late morning light, I felt a deep stab of fear at the idea that my life might really and truly change. A big change. New people. Strangers. A new life in a new city. After such giant changes, would I still be me? Of course I recalled the poem about how you can never escape yourself, every place is the same because you are the one moving to that place. No doubt true. I recalled also the old notion from psychotherapy that people fear change because it can only be change for the worse, in that you turn into a different person and are therefore no longer yourself. Thus change as death.
But death of habits. That’s all it is, I told myself. Remember the poem; you can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy.
No: the fear I was feeling was perhaps the fear that even if things changed, I would still be just as unhappy as before. Ah yes, that was a real fear!
Well, but I was always afraid. So this was no different.
An excerpt from Chapter 92 of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Would I miss this place? The beautiful mountains, the beautiful faces …
No. I would not miss it. This I promised myself; and it seemed like a promise I could keep. Maybe that was my form of happiness.
jessa 