A Sine Wave

A full circle.

It’s said that if you hang around long enough, you see how life comes full circle.

Perhaps.

But I like to think of life as a sine wave.

You’re born naive; your mind’s impressionable: as white as a clean slate. Then life happens. You experience a sundry of emotions. You struggle. You succeed. Sometimes you’re triumphant. At other times you’re defeated. You walk through life collecting points or wasting chances. More often than not, you walk to the wrong door and end up staying there. Only the courageous ones tend to walk away.

You will fill your basket with experiences.

There are times when you’re so miserable that you cry. There are also times when you’re on top of the world and are ecstatic. Today you’re following your gut. Tomorrow you may listen to your mind.

If You stay here long enough, you’ll realise that there will always be people above you. Since you’re able to read this you’re already above a billion people who can’t read or write. But you’re by no means the ‘best reader’ or ‘writer’ that there is. You may be good, but not the best. There’s no best.

Tolstoy or Shakespeare, who do you pick?

If you’re lucky, you experience the entire spectrum of colours that life is. You know love, and you know heartbreak. You realise how vital it is to fail before you can succeed. Wise ones accept that all states of life (good or bad) are ephemeral. Life isn’t a lake. It’s a free flowing river that alternatively floods and recedes. You’re either going to have too much water or too little of it. Occasionally, you’ll have just enough to survive.

I like to think of my own journey as an uphill climb. The views are breathtaking, but it’s too easy to tumble down the treacherous road. I can’t see which way the road is going to turn next because there’s a perpetual dense fog around me. I don’t know where I’m going to end up; but with hindsight, I tread ahead.

I like the sinusoidal curve that life is. Peaks would make no sense to me if I never see the troughs. I won’t understand joy until I’ve felt pain. I won’t value success unless I’ve worked hard to achieve it. I need to feel in order to live; I won’t value life until I’ve felt it. But once I feel life I can never ‘unfeel’ it. I cannot wipe my slate clean again— there’s no duster. I will never be able to forget the experiences that made me, me.

It sounds so cliched that it’s almost unbelievable. But when it comes to life, it cannot be a circle. How can it be if the beginning and end do not coincide?

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