Of delayed milestones and choosing to live

End of a calendar year always makes me want to reflect and account for it. I guess this is my way of trying to summarise the value of the time that was spent and not let it go unnoticed.

Like one of the things that I learnt this year is that when people tell you to live your life as if this is your last day - they are basically asking you to do an impossible task. (Until humans learn to time travel that is.)

I think that if I knew today really was my last day, I would possibly make a few different choices. 

But in reality you can never know that. And you cannot choose individual moments, you always choose a moment along with its consequences. 

I tend to choose moments with consequences I am prepared to live with (and not have to die the next day). Some of them maybe regrets. Some unfulfilled curiosities. And some impulsive risks. Of course since consequences are in the future, you can only make a guess. Though many times it is not that hard to extrapolate, sometimes you could miscalculate. You still do have to live with it. 

(And then it boils down to how objective you can be about making mistakes, learning and moving on. But I have already written extensively about my learnings about making mistakes before.)

Another thing that happened recently, again left me quite pensive.

I had a few hours of panic and self doubt after speaking to a very good friend. It seems I have not been achieving any of the expected milestones in life and I was starting to feel a bit like a student with learning disability who keeps falling back in class.

I soon reasoned with myself that milestones are not absolute. Just like the notion of truth is not absolute. It is more like a probability, given a set of conditions/constraints and depends a lot on the subject. 

But with that I also realised that unfortunately we still do need our own personal goals/milestones to give us a general direction (or the much overused term 'purpose') in life. And equally importantly, we also need to space them in such a way that every now and then we are rewarded with mini achievements. 

Below are some of my high level goals which have been consistent over pretty much the last decade (some are in fact carry over from the last two decades really!)

1. Visit Antarctica.

2. Publish my book of verses.

3. Be able to innovate/invent as an engineer.

4. Understand what terms like freedom and happiness mean to me.

5. Do whatever it takes to feel alive.

(Of course I also have little ones which I hope are increasing my chances of getting to the big ones one day.)

Otherwise, 2013 has been less adventurous than usual so far (of course everything could change in the last month!). However the number of interesting people I have met this year has surely gone up and I have managed to sneak in an address change in the last minute, so life is still interesting. There were also some healthy doses of farewells, disappointments, embarrassments and even tiny victories which have kept me going and left me wanting more.

Always a good way to end, I think.