Bday

Lil Feather said that the sad thing today is the evidence that I’m growing old. (Yup, today my dear friends is my birthday though I don’t mean the date when I post this, but the date when I wrote this). I’m growing old indeed still without nothing to prove to the people around me and also to myself. This is the sad, hard fact of my more than 30 years of existence.

This morning, I woke up earlier than the usual, with the bad collective recollection of the years that had gone by. Drat! I said to myself, I haven’t done what I was suppose to do these past years and here I am rotting in my parents house. And this followed by the sutble pain in the stomach and sudden urgency to do something or else I will be in dire straits until my old age – and it is coming sooner than I expect it to be.

Then while channel-surfing I caught on the cable the 1997 NBA Finals between the Bulls and the Jazz. I could not imagine that it was almost a decade since that momentous time. I recalled how time flies by when then a document analyst and was having a fast, easy-go-lucky kind of life never bothering about the future. Arg! The year 2006 was a non-existent time for me and either as a goal for whatever undertaking I had then. Then suddenly, it stirred me that I was seeing this year as a gauge of what I have done so far.

And so far, nothing it seems.

Thinking about it, there are small achievements nevetheless that i have done. Like being published by a national paper and a magazine; working as a writer for an online magazine and two publication houses though for short period only and able to pose as a columnist once.

Then like a thunder of hope, I realise that it is not true that I have not done anything. My long-time dream of writing for a magazine and being a columnist, even just for a single issue, has come true. That is already a feat for a 21-year old then who could not write a decent sentence.

I have gone a long way so it seems.

The only trouble with my struggle is that I cannot take off completely but it is obvious that I can do something as a writer. Yes, I cannot take off completely. But, mother of all hopes, I am getting there slow it may be. I know I will get there.

Probably, this guilt of having done nothing is caused by the my relative absence of work for sometime now. And, probably, it is.