Day 11: Memory Lane

Today’s Prompt: Where did you live when you were 12 years old?

Today’s twist: pay attention to your sentence lengths and use short, medium, and long sentences

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I have had Photoshop lessons. And that introduced me to a feature called content-aware. This post seems to be a full-blown account of writing with awareness about the content and this is what goes through my mind when I read this. And I have a personal twirl on Today’s Prompt. An experience that I had when I was a 12-year-old nerdy kid. It was a competition for which I had been chosen to participate in. It was a national level competition and I had to travel to New Delhi (close to 2500KM or 1550 miles). The qualifying round was actually simple. The round involved a multiple choice question answer quiz about computers and such. The unexpected was getting selected. There were brainier kids in my class, not to count for the brainier classes nearby.

New Delhi was freezing. I could hear my chattering teeth and watch my breath condense in the air. For someone who had spent their whole life in a city whose seasons are often labelled as – Hot, Hotter and Hottest – this felt cool. We checked into our rooms. We, as in, all the students selected for the national level. Then, I took one of the worst decisions of my life from which I learnt one GREAT lesson from my life.

So this was a team event where each participant had one partner. My teammate’s parents had tagged along for the trip. So, once we were at our rooms, I had a choice waiting for me:

1. Either sleep in the common dormitory with all the other participants, or
2. Shift to the room booked for my teammate and his parents

And being the super eager kid that I was, I went ahead and picked the latter option, which in hindsight might not have been the brightest of my life’s decisions. Once I shut the dorm door and opened the room of my teammate, I realised what happened. I think I brought with me an awkward silence into his family. I’ll keep the story short. I’m not going to provide the embarrassing details.  It was awkward for me, I never brought it up with the teammate ever.

The lesson that I learnt was that the doors around you will open and close. More often than not, it is you who makes the choices as to which door you choose. Don’t make a choice if you don’t know what you get to gain, and importantly, what you stand to lose.

And about how it’s your choices that count, well others’ choices do count. The choices that every single person (involved directly and indirectly in your life) make in your life is like one piece of a puzzle. Those are the destinies that you are meant to fulfil. The final piece of the puzzle, which completes it and brings out the whole beautiful view of the picture is your choice. It’s your choice that will define or defy the importance of all the previous choices. So, choose wisely. Make informed choices.