It’s 1:34 am. I’m in my apartment, probably the only one awake. There is silence all around. All I hear is the tap on these keys as I write this article.
A faint roar outside just caught my attention — looks like it was the gushing wind. The night is cloudy but not in a sinister way. As I look outside the window, the beautiful view of Manhattan skyline takes my breath away. Far across the Hudson river, randomly lit windows shimmer in the darkness like stars in the sky.
Insomnia is usually a bitch—but tonight I’m grateful to be awake, writing and absorbing every bit of this moment.
Seven years ago, in 2015, when I came to NYC for the first time, I fell in love with Manhattan and decided to live in this city one day. I had no idea how that would happen. In fact, at one point of time in my life, every dream seemed to be far from my reach.
In 2017, if you asked me what I was going to do the next year, I probably couldn’t tell you shit. Of course, that invariably was ignited the motivation for me to quit my job and spend fifteen months exploring just about everything I wanted to in life.
But tonight is different. Tonight, I’m exactly where I need to be. It is one of those moments where your mind and body can feel that there is no other place on this earth where you’d rather be.
Will this last? Our future is governed by several internal and external factors, so obviously I cannot control or predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. But I know that right now, my present is as close to what I’d imagined in my head as it could possibly be.
It gives me the jitters to recollect all that has happened between 2015 and 2023. This newfound calmness in life is making me feel like I just got out of a thrilling rollercoaster ride, filled with a feeling of incredible joy, and contentment, and relief.
However, I know that I’m extremely fortunate to be feeling this way because not everyone can. A sizeable number of my dreams have come true in the last few years. Hell, I had to fight left, right and center to make them happen. But I’m cognizant of the fact that a lot of those dreams could’ve gotten shattered as well. I try to be humble and accepting of whatever the future has in store for me.
All of this makes me wonder—in my previous post I wrote about a realization that every decision I made in the past determined the direction my life was going to take in the future.
However, an even more crucial realization is that, for every decision that you make in life, there is a very well-defined cost and return associated with it. When you dare to watch ambitious dreams, it takes an incredible amount of determination, perseverance and commitment to pursue it, without even a shred of assurance that you’ll actually get to achieve any of it.
And on the off-chance that you do actually get to achieve whatever you set out to desire, a daunting realization accompanies the feeling of accomplishment — that an infinite number of things had to not happen in order for a few things to happen.
And this usually includes not just what happened with you, but also what happened to others around you. Life, therefore, is just a gigantic game theory problem statement of optimizing the trade-offs between “choosing option A” vs. “losing option B”.
Can we optimize it and find an optimal solution? Maybe, maybe not. That question would probably be answered on another insomnia-filled night.
For now, all I care about is the clouded sky in front of me, and the clarity with which I’m able to see it.
