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 tapping sound of the keys as I write this article. A faint roar outside just caught my attention—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 out, across the Hudson river, haphazardly lit windows shimmer in the darkness like stars in the sky.
Insomnia is usually a bitch—but tonight I feel grateful to be awake, writing and absorbing the beauty of this moment.
Seven years ago, in 2015, I fell in love with Manhattan and decided to live out of this city one day. I had no idea how I would make that happen. In fact, at one point of time, every dream seemed far away 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. Obviously, that was a strong motivation to quit my job and spend fifteen months of my life exploring everything I wanted to.
But tonight is different. Tonight, I’m exactly where I need to be. Of course, our future is governed by several internal and external factors so I cannot control or predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. But I know that right now, my present is as close as it could’ve possibly been to what I had imagined in my head.
It gives me goosebumps to recollect everything that has happened in between from 2015 to 2023. The calmness in life now makes me feel like I just got out of a thrilling rollercoaster ride and am filled with a feeling of incredible joy and contentment.
I know, however, that I’m extermely fortunate to be saying this, 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 come true. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that a lot of those dreams could get 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 took in the past determined the direction my life was going to take. An even more important realization is that, there is a well-defined cost and return associated with every decision that you make in life. When you dare to watch ambitious dreams, it takes an incredible amount of determination, perseverance and commitment to pursue it—without a shred of assurance that you will actually achieve any of it.
But on the off-chance that you do actually get whatever you set out to desire, a daunting realization accompanies the satisfaction of accomplishment—that an infinite number of things had to not happen in order for this to happen. And this most likely includes not just your dreams, but the dreams of others that were dependent on you. Life is, therefore, 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.
