Standing still or moving on?

What do you do when others have plans and you don’t? When their lives seem to be moving on to newer, exciting things and yours seems to be standing still. Do you feel jealous or share in their joy. Do you pretend to be happy while inwardly cringing. At what? At being alone, left out, at stagnating, at becoming a non-entity? You begin introspecting, probing and prodding at every decision that brought you to this very moment. Are you becoming one of those people that time leaves behind? Are you saying goodbyes to people or are people saying goodbye to you. Are you turning into those people you used to pity when you thought your life was fun?

Whilst these thoughts ring through your head and make you feel more morose and sad than you already are, a thought hits you. “Hang on,” it says, “If people are moving on, so are you”. You. Moving on? How? Simply put, when something is removed from an equation there is a shift in balance. It equals out, lessens out or increases.  In all three scenarios you realise that your life was not all that bad or perfect then, neither is it now but you now have the choice to either keep it the way it was or work to make it better.  The players may change but the elements remain the same.

You find yourself reaching out to people who until then were on the fringes of your social circle. You suddenly have more time to discover other things. In the familiarity of the mundane, you slipped into habits that you are now forced to abandon or change to suit the new. So how is change bad? As they say, “when life hands you a lemon, what do you do with it?”