THE MILESTONES

THE MILESTONES
I've decided to replace my goal with milestones. There are several milestones along the way to the goal. Crossing frontiers seems to be easier as compared to the apparent distant destination. Crossing of each milestone would be celebrated in my life. Each milestone crossed would mark a victory. This is like celebrating one's birthday every year: each birthday marks a milestone in one's life. The road to the goal in my life is punctuated by several milestones.

The milestones in my life seem to be separated by quite a vast distance. The distance could be compared to the echelons of time separating the developments on the history of human evolution. The conquest of each milestone in my life has resonated with a different frequency because they were separated by such a vast distance. Crossing of each milestone has not been easy, but every milestone crossed has been an achievement in itself. The crossing of each milestone has been celebrated in my life.

My life has been driven about quite recklessly by the despotic hands of fate and time: everyone has to make a compromise between fate and time, and so have I. It is bad when one's fate runs away with time, it is worse when one's fate outgrows time. There ought to be a balance between the two. My life seems to be tilted towards the negative side of the balance. Fate has certainly done its best to punctuate the track of my life with countless obstacles. There seem to be a lot of obstacles along the way to the goal: there are a lot of milestones along the way. The journey of my life seems to have a lot of halts en route the destination. I sometimes wonder if I ought to rejoice at the contrast that I find between my life and others' lives. Others seem to have reached their goals with considerable ease. I seem to be the only one who has been lingering about milestones for quite some time. The only consolation is that this might be the definition of beauty in my life.

My life has been an eclectic collection of failures. I seem to have had the honour of embracing failures at every step. Life has brought me before so many failures that I sometimes fear losing all hope. It is a sin, the greatest crime you can offer to The Power that created us to cast away hope, I know. Life has not been so bad after all. I remind myself of the myriad of opportunities of happiness and success that fate has been kind enough to put into my kitty. There have always been moments of joy in my life that have been celebrated. With the passage of time, even our failures, the sadder moments of our lives, find their way into the thesaurus of celebration. I now realise that what was an apparent failure at a point in time in my history, was a blessing in disguise. In this way, almost every event in my life has given way to celebration. The passage of time has worked miracles on what appeared to be failures. These failures have manifested themselves as milestones along the way to the destination. The failures seemed to be fatal wounds to me at one point of time, but time heals all wounds, things don't seem to be as bad once time applies its balm over the wounds. Things change, and with this, changes the definition of the bitter past.

My past is almost a dream now. Like all dreams, it too shall eventually fade into obscurity with the passage of time. Although my past is bound to haunt me for a long time to come, I now have an opportunity to laugh at the hundreds of things that could have happened, and even at the assortment of things that could not happen. My past would be an asylum that I can resort to whenever I feel intimidated by the present. This would be escaping from the realities that life presents before me, I know, but the shelter would have to be sought for whenever I am not particularly thrilled by the sky and the sun.

The sun has been shining so fiercely on my that I desperately need a shelter. I want to escape the sweltering heat of the sun, I want to get away from the hot and humid weather that would be the order of the day in a few months. I have a long way to go, my goal is quite far off, the weather is not going to be pleasant, but I will take life piecemeal now: I've replaced my goal with milestones.