Life is a road with many crossroads in it and sometimes we seem to be standing at the intersection for the longest time because we honestly do not know which road to take. As you stand at that intersection the mental gymnastics are absolutely phenomenal, for lack of a better description they are Olympic worthy gymnastics. I have watched my thoughts go to the overthinking tournaments and win first prize because I stood at mental crossroads for too long. Theatrics and thoughts go hand in hand especially if you are uncertain.

I don’t feel qualified to speak about feeling lost and finding yourself. First because I still feel lost; I am not very sure of who I am yet or where I am headed in life. Second, I feel like to fully put across this idea or any idea for that matter you had to have lived it and successfully solved it too or at least tried to. I am quite plainly in my opinion none of the above and grossly under qualified but I shall try my best.

In this fiasco we call living you are likely to encounter your fair share of fires. Some real and physical, others existential. The former being much easier to put out than the latter depending on the scale. The real fires however can spark the existential ones, with enough destruction to cause internal interruption.

As I said before I am not the best person to speak on this dilemma around finding yourself, but I will nonetheless throw my two cents into the basket. They will likely disappear under the many other coins but for me just knowing they are there is enough.

I never really felt lost until I reached the age of nineteen. When I turned nineteen suddenly the world felt bigger than before and I had to fit in it even though I felt very small. However I did not know where to place myself and even if I did place myself somewhere I did not know if I’d fit there. For me life was a jigsaw puzzle and everyone had their place in it. Fast forward to my quickly approaching twenty second year on earth I do not quite feel the same any more.

It’s interesting how much you can learn in a year or two just from experiences both your own and those of other people, from observation and listening to both those that know and those that don’t know. There are no words that ring true to me than those of Eleanor Roosevelt that are “learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them yourself.” It’s true. There are many things I have avoided or have chosen to do differently because I saw someone make a mistake. Slowly through this trial and error I have learnt that there is actually no place for you to fit but rather you create a space for yourself.

Where you decided to fit is for you to decide. It can be in the normal hum drum of life, nothing extraordinary (an ironic word if I ever heard one, with an even more ironic description). Or it can be in grand dreams, chasing greatness. Either way you find a space and you make it your own. I’ve come to accept that we all leave a mark, for some our mark will only be felt by a few in our community and the occasional stranger. For others the mark is felt worldwide, with many benefiting or suffering due to it.

Our mark, fingerprint, personal identifier is hinged on our character and values that inform our actions. I’m not talking about what was instilled in you as a child, that is merely a foundation. I am talking about what you build based on the decisions you make especially the hard and pivotal ones. Do the ends justify the means or are there some things you just will not do?

I hated mathematics as a child, I have some of my teachers to thank for that but mathematics is life. All you do in life is make calculations, not always with numbers but with decisions and the likely consequences of them. In business there is the term opportunity cost, this is the potential benefits that are missed when a business owner, an investor or a person chooses one alternative over another. The formula for this is the return on best forgone option subtracted by the return on the chosen option. This calculation helps you evaluate the costs and benefits of all the options available to you and compare them so you arrive at the most sensible decision. Life has a long line of opportunity costs that might have led us down different paths but for reasons best known to ourselves we did not take them. As a result we stand where we are today, doing whatever we happen to be doing due to these decisions.

Life is definitely what you make it. It is quite a cliché and rather ambiguous statement but it is true. If you are feeling lost just remember it is a step by step process to finding yourself with very round corners, Everest level highs and sea floor lows. It not an instant process where one day it just clicks, it just slowly forms as you live and try out what the world has to offer and it is underpinned by a feeling of contentment. At the end of the day in the dusk of your life you want contentment, whatever that means or looks like for you as a person. You will change a lot as the decades run by, both internally and externally but I’ve figured if you make the right decisions even when they feel like they aren’t or are hard to do and are true to yourself, you should be alright.

Above all if you believe in God, pray for guidance it helps. If you don’t may you have the wisdom to do right by yourself and those around you.

Those are just my two cents.

2020 Lockdown – a weird state of mind, where time slowed down while simultaneously speeding up at the same.

I’ve watched the world stop

So still

A pin could drop in the east

and you would hear it in the west

But as the world got quiet and loud

My thoughts became a festival

I’ve never heard them before

They turn sunny days, rainy

and rainy days, sunny

I watched everyone through frosted glass

Seeing the parts that they illuminated

Never seeing the dark side of the moon

Like watching candles burning through the windows of a church

I crushed, badly during the first lockdown. I’ve struggled for a long time with depression (I have never clinically had it diagnosed) or as the internet likes to call it “the big sad”, and I thought I had finally learned to control it but the covid-19 lockdown of 2020 showed me otherwise.

Do you know those scenes of people crying themselves to sleep in movies? That was my life for some nights, except there was no soundtrack to my breakdowns. Just pain and the weird hope for a new day. The only positive side effect, was that the sleep after crying was actually really good and peaceful. Whoever said crying a form of therapy was right.

I will never forget the feeling of being left behind as I watched people do all these wonderful things during the lockdown. The fear of missing out was excessively strong as I saw people start businesses, pursued new hobbies, re-discovered old hobbies and I on the other did nothing. One would ask what were you afraid of missing out on? I don’t know to be honest all knew was I felt like a potato, I knew I could do something but I really did not have the energy to do anything. As my days sort of blurred into each other and the concept of time being a construct begun to take on actual meaning for me, I let go. Slowly at first. I let go of my feelings of being left behind, I made an effort to work through my feelings instead of avoiding them. When I stopped comparing myself to others, I re-discovered things I loved doing but had forgotten about in the midst of the hustle and bustle that is life.

However this created a very different hurdle for me. Should I post the stuff I am doing? That was a constant question for me as I engaged with long forgotten hobbies. Weird to say that even if the pressure was really from within, it felt like people needed to see what I was doing as a sort of validation of the fact that I actually was good at what I was doing. It seems that as I let go of comparison, for a hot minute, I took on the burden of seeking validation. It was two steps forward and five steps backwards with this.

I then realized something, I was doing this for me. These long forgotten hobbies were my means of escape from my brain that goes into overdrive but never seems to overheat. We thank the Lord the brain is like a CPU but the mechanics are different. If I was going to share what I was doing with other people then I needed to shake off the imaginary pressure to impress. I should not be sharing from a place of needing validation for the things I am capable of and whether they were worthy of my time.

The lockdown of 2020 was a chance for me to grow in ways I did not know I needed to. The imposed full stop on how busy life can get was actually a blessing in disguise. In a world where you can feel inadequate for not having any tangible results, I hope you are able to realize that those tangible results come from the intangible work that happens on the inside and the hours of tangible work put in behind the scenes. In the words of Shakespeare “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players”, so play your part but do not lose your heart. Life happens for you but it also happens to you, how ever you react to both depends on you.