Keep walking.

The important thing is to keep walking. Maybe you won’t get where you intended. Never mind, keep walking. Maybe life will seem pointless and you will lose your sense of purpose. Keep walking. Perhaps your friends will grow distant, disillusioned by your perpetual rudderlessness, your family will become indifferent, and the woman you love will eventually give up on you as a lost cause. Don’t lose heart for you will have yourself. So keep walking. You might end up becoming the man you had once looked down upon in disdain. Keep walking – the act of living is an experience in itself and it is in no way less instructive than the experiences you consider richer or more wholesome. You will fail, you will falter, you might even find all your peers getting ahead of you in the ‘race’ called Life. However, if you dig your heels in, and still manage to convince yourself to keep walking, then I can assure you that you will come to earn yourself some respect towards the fag end of your life.

Your trials are your own. Your failures are your demons to contend with. In the confines of your psyche, they are absolute and final. No one will ever understand your struggles as well as you do. While you march, no applause is going to acknowledge your effort. There will be no medals for the hurdles you cross everyday, even if your shortcomings and your debacles are unforgivingly hurled into the limelight. But this is the price you must pay for strength of character.

It is a choice you make. It is not inherently good; no God is going to come and make these decisions easier. If you choose to walk, then you must choose to keep walking, and find a reason to do so that does not lie outside the purview of the activity itself. If you do, then you have to keep walking because that is all the reason you need. That is all the reason you will ever have.

I wish I could tell you that it gets easier. However, I am in no position to make promises. If you can do it now, when you have begun to run away from ‘living’ because of the way it makes you feel, you will get better at this. If you just close your eyes and keep walking, things might not get any worse because even when they do, you will know that that which is difficult and absolute has already happened. You will know that in that moment of reckoning, you had made up your mind to keep walking. So when your unruly mind threatens to engulf you and you can’t make sense of your journey through reason, keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep walking. That is life itself.