It all began back in the rather uneventful year of 1974. It was an unspectacular year, much like the one before it. And the one that followed it. He was born to a young, newly married couple. Their first born.
Throughout his years at elementary school, his life was much like the year of his birth. He learned to add, and subtract. He learned to draw within the lines. He learned his ABCs.
He didn’t care much for his sister when she was born just 18 months after his rather beige birth.
“Ja, she’s nice. But you can take her back now,” he said to his parents when they brought her home from the hospital.
It was during elementary school that his parents decided to divorce. He didn’t find this a nuisance partly because most of his friends’ parents were divorced. And because over the years, the level of arguing within the home had grown almost unbearable. It was during these times that his imagination grew fertile. He would lie in bed, under the covers, pretending that the duvet on his simple Pine-frame bed was in fact made of cement and that he lay under it, cocooned from the outside world. He would lie there in the darkness and feel oddly safe.
His elementary school years followed him to the local boys’ high school. The very same school his father had attended. Until now, his life had been quite sheltered. The only cuss words he would hear would come from rugged villains on the westerns playing on the TV set in the lounge. And when couples kissed on TV he would blush from embarrassment if either one of his parents were in the room.
So it should come as no surprise that high school came as quite a shock to the young, quiet boy.
At break times, he would meander aimlessly through the school’s many corridors, eating his packed lunches nonchalantly. He would watch the other boys as they sat in groups in the shade and laughed. He watched as some would chase each other around the edge of the sports field. And he would wish he had friends.
He was not an exemplary student by any means. Often times, he would sit in class and gaze out the classroom window at a passing hawk, or at the way the boughs of the Wisteria trees bent in the wind.
But he excelled at English. He would look forward to his lessons about Shakespearen literature. And old English poetry. However, try as he may, he could never grasp the concept of Math, much to his father’s dismay. When he decided to try his hand at Art, he learned firsthand of the depth of his father’s dismay for it was his father who had hoped his son would go on to become a fine tradesman, much like himself. Or perhaps he would excel on the sports field as he had when he was in high school.
But the young boy, who was a ‘late bloomer’ physically, would never follow in his father’s footsteps. He discovered that he had no aptitude for sports and was clumsy with a ball.
He remained tall and lanky while many of the other boys in his class started to fill out. Their voices started to crackle and deepen, and yet the young boy remained the same. At times, during physical education class, he would intentionally drag his feet along the cement pathway that lead to the physical education changing rooms so as not to have to undress in front of his class mates and face their ridicule at his lithe physique.
Sometimes, in the summer months when the swimming program was on, he would skip physical education class altogether and instead go to the art studio and catch up on work which had fallen behind.
He graduated high school with his class mates, many of whom went on to various prestigious centers of learning around the nation. He too had been accepted to one, but when he had mustered up both the courage and the pride to announce this to his father, he was asked who he thought would pay for this education. So as he watched his former class mates go off to college to become doctors and diplomats, he went to the local bakery to start earning his keep.
So the young boy who was now growing into a young man went to seek work. It would be almost a decade later before he enrolled as a freshman in college. A career of higher learning that was to last all of two years.
As the years dragged on, he where his talents lay. And he pursued them. His journeys around the world had begun. They took him to lands he had only heard about in the news. Yet all the while, he began learning more about himself, the world around him, and his place within it.
He began to realize that his chosen career path had little to do with his aptitude, but rather his life experiences up until that very moment. And while traveling on that path, he began to receive recognition for his aptitude. Awards came from various European countries, some from America, and a few from his homeland which he had left behind so many years before.
And all the while, the young boy who was finally becoming a young man felt empty. He felt a yearning for his family. And yet simultaneously an unexplainable desire to prove to his father, and to himself, that he had become successful. Despite all the odds. That in the face of adversity, he overcome all obstacles.
As he faces the many daunting challenges which no doubt lay ahead of him, he is reminded of his past. Of the mistakes he has made. Of the lessons he hopes he has learned from them. He is reminded of his family, so many thousands of miles away. And each time he hears of ill news about family and family friends back home, something inside of him withers. He wonders if he has indeed done the right thing by staying away. And yet, almost as if by epiphany, he realizes that he has learned more about himself and the world in the ten years away from his family than he did in the 24 he was with them. And so the internal struggle continues within him.
But our story is not all gloom for the young man continues to seek the happiness he once knew. The happiness which was the innocence of all things young. He realizes that that happiness comes now in various forms. And he actively seeks them out, as small as they are. As infrequent as they may occur. For it is in their minute size and infrequence that he is able to truly grasp the very core of what it means to be genuinely happy.
He has learned that happiness can come in the form of a job well done, just as it can come in the form of a birthday card sent from many thousands of miles away. And that lesson is just one of many our young boy who gradually turned into a young man has learned along the journey of self-discovery that is life.
He was born in the rather uneventful year of 1974. And today, that young man turns 34.
