It’s way past midnight and I’m still up and pondering. I met a friend recently and had a long chat over lunch about each other’s lives and catching up on what has happened to each of us thus far. We haven’t met for years, so you can imagine how much there was to update each other, what more with kids in our lives now.
As the conversation went on, we soon touched on very sensitive and private sharing and by the time lunch was over, I felt overwhelmed. Sometimes all you see on the surface is really far from what is happening in reality. It saddened me somewhat to hear some of the updates and we both ended our lunch with a promise to meet again to talk more.
The truth is that after that lunch, it has left me to think a lot about how each of us evolve in life. At one point in our lives, we were carefree and had nothing much to worry about other than passing our exams. At the most, the biggest drama we had was probably what to wear for the final year prom and whether we had a date to go with.
But now that we have grown up and entered the new phases of life being a spouse and a parent, we have a lot more on our plate to worry about than those carefree days of being a student. Sometimes I think I have it tough at work but when I hear other people’s stories of dealing with an impossible boss, family problems, health issues that involve looking for treatments for Mesothelioma, dilemmas on difficult choices to make, suddenly I don’t feel like I have it that bad anymore.
Sometimes it takes other people’s misfortunes to make us realise how good we have it. It’s true, isn’t it? Anyway, I shall not think too much and too deeply about problems of the world that do not belong to me. I’m looking forward to going to bed, to lie next to Ryan and be thankful that he is my beautiful son. That’s enough to put a wide smile on my face.
