An Ineluctable Growth

Moving out, away from the more-apparent-than-real comfort of the place one calls 'home', is a challenge one has to take up at one point or another. After a while, I have come to realize one thing: that to really grow is to move out of the place you know too well, and venture into something one deems less comfortable, less familiar and less mundane.

Time alters a lot of things, the tangibles and the intangibles. Time alters realities, ditching old ones with new, how ever unanticipated and unwelcome the new ones are. The changing tides lend a shift in context and dynamics of people's thinkings, and more often than not, that shift triggers a kind of psychological suffering, a kind of heartache that is indescribable.

An elder's reluctance and inability to let go, more often than not, will result in a sort of power struggle that ends in torment to self and others. The ensuing bouts of cold shoulders and silent retaliations do make one wonder if these are ever going to get better, and if they do get better, when are things going to turn pear-shaped again. A day? Or two?

I believe one is not destined to thrive in an environment where the presence of a living volcano waiting to explode is so strongly sensed. The tense, occasionally poisonous, atmosphere may well render one insane, assuming one is ever sane to start with. If day in day out, one is stared in the face by the prospect of raw emotions spiraling up into a cloud of unrelenting misery, or down into a pit full of anger and vengeance... then I feel it is indeed time to take a step back, peruse the whole picture, and bid the painful but necessary goodbyes.

The gratefulness will be there for life, the love will stay for eternity. Perhaps, stepping out of the shadows, one might actually find the experience of basking in the sun a rewarding one. And perhaps, one could better serve one's responsibilities as a child.

Qi