I have been tossing and turning in bed over the last hour or so, unable to sleep due to a terrible flu. I decided to get up and write this post as the idea for this suddenly struck me. As my fingers type away on the keyboard, I realize they are shaking slightly, and that I smell of Vicks Vaporub. I pause for a while, and the pitter-patter of raindrops on the window distracts me. But I know I just have to carry on and capture my thoughts into words, but I don’t know why my blog takes precedence over my diary at this particular moment.
Anyway, the thing is just this: in a few months from now, I’ll turn twenty eight on a twenty eighth. For me this is the personal equivalent of the ‘Turning Thirty’ phenomenon. I remember reading Mike Gayle’s novel by the same name about two years back, and it was then that twenty eight became ‘the’ age for me. The novel’s protagonist Matt Beckford’s thoughts on turning thirty are excerpted below from the publisher’s write-up,
Thirty means going to the pub if there's somewhere to sit down. Thirty means owning at least one classical CD, even if it's 'Now That's What I Call Classical Vol 6'. Thirty means calling off the search for the perfect partner because now, after all these years in the wilderness, you've finally found what you've been looking for.
As I had finished reading the book then, I had asked myself, “What do I want for myself when I turn twenty-eight?”, and the first thought that had crossed my mind was this, “I want to be living in a house with a library and a garden” [1]. Over the last two years I have revisited this question many times, and I no doubt have many answers. All of these reflect a part of me, but THE answer which is me in totality has eluded me so far. May be I’ll arrive at the answer in the run-up to my birthday, may be I’ll not, or it is also possible that thirty five or even forty turns out to be “my twenty eight”, but right now I can’t do much except to jot down my foremost thoughts on this. When I turn twenty eight, I would like…
- …to have moved-on. I have many bitter memories hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross. I think I have learnt my lessons from those trying times, but the memories still haunt me. I must have learnt to let go of that negativity.
- …to have acquired the strength to understand that I am what I am and not to compare myself with anybody; and more importantly not to get riled by others’ comparisons.
- …to have learnt to be at peace with myself.
I have had many such thoughts competing for my "Turning Twenty Eight Manifesto", but may be you get the idea from the three above…it’s all just on the lines of becoming a better person. And these could well be passed off as new year/any birthday resolutions…but these are not what I am looking for. Hell, I had even created an account on 43things.com about an year ago just for fun, to see if that helped, but it turned out to be an utter waste of time. All I ended up doing there was to think of things that I wanted to do before twenty-eight (I remember one amusing entry that I created then; it was to throw away my blanket after I read an article on the BBC about deaths caused by mite-infested blankets. But no, I still haven’t discarded that blanket, because it was one of the first things I had bought with my first salary. Emotional bonding to material things, that’s the characteristic that I wish to get rid of).
So there you now see my thoughts on turning twenty eight. I am uncertain to a great extent. I have the bits and pieces that make up the jig-saw, but turns out that, it is one of those humongous thousand piece puzzles. I need time, and I definitely need patience to get it right.
[1]. A library with my own books, and a garden that I would have created. And I was pretty sure that the house in question would be a rented one…striking gold in the profession would take a few more years :).
