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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Savestate: Chapter 25

Good grief, I'm twenty-five tomorrow.

Here's the obligatory 'lessons learned-post' from the last five-ish years, and I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point.

One won't experience real freedom without experiencing real responsibility.
The best thing about being an adult isn't just the fact that you can do whatever you want. It's also the fact that you become responsible with how you do it (and what happens as a consequence) and you have the final say on how you deal with it. With that being said...

Growing old does not necessarily mean growing up.
When I was a kid, I felt like the adults around me were the most boring people around - going about talking grown-up matters and doing grown-up things. As time went on I chanced upon people who brought the things they loved as children well into their adulthood (and sometimes pursue it as their careers). I realized that most people never really let go of the things they did as children - it's just that people have wildly varying interests and that's what makes them, them.

Everyone has off days.
There's bad service, then there's inconsistency. It's really hard to distinguish between the two (and at times, it's impossible) but sometimes (within reason, of course) you just have to give people the benefit of a doubt. Everyone goes through bad days and it's a horrible feeling to be on the other side of the customer-service equation. There are times when there's no longer anything you can do to bring a situation forward - and hard as it may be, we have to accept that.

Dictum meum pactum.
My word is my bond. It's the first company value I was ever told about on my first job. How one speaks says a lot about what goes in their head. What they talk about and how they follow through with it speaks a lot (pardon the pun) about their character. In a way, it's one of the many reasons I left. Practice what you preach, as the saying goes - and I'll leave it at that.

Bitter is a flavor we learn to appreciate when we’re older. In fact, it’s okay to taste bitter from time to time
There's a lot of context that can be derived from this, and in my case, it's a way of giving way to perspective in terms of the bad cards we're dealt with in life. It's a way of appreciating where we are now - and this is the culmination of every (good and bad) decision that we've been given the choice of making. In other words, we would be very different people if we chose differently. And at some and in some way...

I realize that I have a lot.
I have so much, in fact, that I find myself happy and content and restless and giddy and scared and excited and humbled and haughty and confused and unfamiliar and focused and passive and impatient and childish and all of those other random things that make someone feel alive and intrepid and lost at the same time. And if that's what this quarter-life crisis hullabaloo is about, then so be it - let's dance (metaphorically speaking). Putting the Law of Averages into consideration, I feel like I've pulled quite a bit ahead of the curve compared to my younger self's expectations - and that's awesome.

Happy birthday to me.

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