An Analogy of Life

This post is an after-thought after speaking to a good friend.

When everything around you seems to go wrong or just not the way you expect or you're simply unhappy about your current situation, sometimes all you need to do is to ask yourself one question -- What's one thing you want to do now if you are not tied down by all the responsibilities you have? As we all grow older, we tend to load more and more burdens onto our shoulders and gradually we would live our lives around these burdens and lost our true selves. Sometimes, all it takes for us to realize is that these burdens are extra stuffs, which we decide to bring along, and so we actually have the choice to leave them down and walk freely again.

Life is like a train ride -- You get onto a train and you do not ask where the train is heading. All you can (and should) do is to pull out your ipod, play your favorite music, sit back and enjoy the ride and possibly meet the people who get onto the train along the way. As the train goes further, all you see are greens from the window and you have a good sense that this train is probably heading to a countryside. If you are enjoying your ride so far, you know that a quiet rural area is probably a destination for you to have a happy life. However, if you're getting sick of seeing all the trees and woods from the window, you may consider getting off in the next station, walk to the nearby platform and get onto a new train, which heads to a city. Or, you may have even met someone you enjoy spending the rest of your life with on the train, and so you do not care as much of where the train is heading. However, if you think too practically in the very beginning and need to predict all risk assessments on which train and where it heads, you would always find yourself standing at the ticket booth, wondering which train to get on.

Believe it or not, I had been standing at the ticket booth for many years as I tended to make too much judgment and refuse to take risks because I was too feared of falling. Being a relatively practical person, I had made the most difficult choices to drop everything and move back to HKG and from HKG back to my original spot. Yet, if you ask me again today, I am glad I have taken a deep breath, blind folded myself, and gotten onto that train. We all grow from experiences. Without the train ride, we would never be able to learn what we truly want in lives and where our desired destinations are ... simply because experiences are essential minerals for a healthy growth and at the end, they shape who we are.