All my writings on this blog painted a different, or should I say, evolving picture of what I thought life was. And this picture is still ever-changing, as if I already have all the puzzle pieces, but I rearrange them once in a while, to make sense of it all; to determine how we can shuffle them again to make something better. We don’t know what life is until we know what life is not.
Woolf says, “To always look life in the face, to know it for what it is.” Each time I look back at certain life events, they tell a different story. Perhaps there’s no right ways to live life. The events that I thought victimized me then, have become something that empowers me, now that I look at it with new eyes. These few days I’ve gone back to read my older articles. Things I wrote to help myself rationalize or understand life and how to live it. To always pick the harder road but not the one that’s the easiest – today, I fully understand the meaning of this. It’s not just about survival. It is the epitome of happiness. The fulfillment lies in the pursuit of happiness, in the harder road.
As we walked deeper into the garden, and away from the shaded path, we found a bench to sit down right opposite a small slope. Our faces are no longer framed by fragmented shapes. They are now whole and intact. We had been on different, yet parallel paths in our lives, walking in the same pace. As you embark on your soul-searching journey, I have stumbled upon the answer to life and its enigma. We see life in ways that it is, as much as in ways that it’s not. Life is not meant to be seen moment by moment, but to be admired as a whole. We must acknowledge the role we play in our own suffering, and we must forgive ourselves for how we survived. We must look life in the face. Cherish the ones who stay, including ourselves. Decorate the space inside our head. Fight for what’s important to us. Stand for something. Breathe. Listen. Slow down. Pause. Feel. Love. Love ourselves unconditionally. Look life in the face, not in fragments, but as a whole.
