Of Sisyphus and His Boulder – a Happy Ending

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About two months ago, my friend and I began planning our summer. We were to visit China’s Yunnan Province, cover Vietnam and then go to Japan for the famous Fuji Rock Festival. Unfortunately, as they say, "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry." And so they did. Work and employment plans, in this case… My friend had decided to stay and work, completing a degree in between, while I realised I could no longer afford going to Japan.

Things change, plans change – everything is constantly on the move.

At first, these facts, this reality, were really depressing. I couldn’t overcome the thought of failing in some way, in the ‘great scheme of things’. I had so much hope for this trip! Why? Why did things not go as planned?! Was it the Universe telling me that I couldn’t actually do it? Was it the Universe questioning my ability to do anything??? I felt so offended, and at the same time I felt like I did when I stepped into that knee-high mud in Langkawi – stuck and afraid to move because ‘what if it’s quicksand?!’

But then it dawned on me... It’s not the Universe. It’s not quicksand. It’s not it at all! It’s all in my head. All those thoughts of failing, of disappointment, frustration over possibilities lost – it was just me, blaming myself for things I have no hands-on control over, cornering myself, just because a plan didn’t work out. That’s not how it works! If we saw, if I saw, every lost opportunity as a room full of closed doors, it would be a depressing reality indeed…

The world is what we want it to be, or indirectly want it to be. Even when we don’t want the negative in our lives, if we dwell on it long enough, then that’s all we’ll see for miles. It indirectly becomes what we ‘want’. When nothing goes right, and we pace up and down and across that room full of closed doors because we cannot imagine anything good coming out of that one, single lost opportunity, then that’s where we’ll remain for a very long time. And this is it. This is the moment. The moment in which we can step out of that little box in our heads and leave that voice saying ‘oh no, you can’t’ behind – the moment to take a step aside and observe.

This magical moment of observing oneself in a seemingly doomed scenario, through a sort of birds-eye view… this is when we have the chance to see what we have missed all along.

I know what I’ve missed. This ‘lost opportunity’ has left a door open but I’ve kept my head down so low, and my mind so preoccupied with failure, that I couldn’t see it: that little crack in the wall. It’s as if it was whispering to me, and finally, in the complete silence I’ve suddenly managed to create through distancing myself from everything, I could hear it loud and clear.

‘Can’t you do it alone?’ it asked.

And that’s when it hit me: I could.

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