25 realizations from a 25 year-old

After I turned 25 last month, I was struck by this desire to list down 25 things I have understood in my life over the course of 25 years. This is perhaps a result of being exposed to such lists on Medium and Quora every alternate day. After I started preparing this list, there were many questions that popped in my head. Did I really have anything important to say? Have I lived enough for creating such a list? Did I understand life well enough for such an exercise? Being caught in an internal conflict, I visited points 9 and 22 in my list. What would be the use of publishing such a list if I failed to implement them myself? And hence, the list below. 
None of the points are groundbreaking or new - they are all the same old pieces of advice that are gifted to us from our family members and good books. But, personally, I have come to understand that I take a life lesson seriously when it is not just offered as a piece of advice but is offered with an example from life. In such an attempt, I have tried to present each point with an example to the best of my efforts. As a reader, if you find even one of the points below to be helpful, I would be a happy writer and a happier human being.  

1. Respect love that comes the easy way
• A realization that hit me during the final year of my college. A realization I wish I had known earlier and a realization I wish is easy to keep up to. The adventure of impressing a new person/a new group always seems more interesting than the routine of keeping up with an accepted love (family/friends). The most painful part (in retrospect) is when you have people who will not let you go, who will not love you less even when you don't repay their love in the right manner. I have had many such angels who have loved me more than I deserve, and have also made me understand that true joy lies in love that you reciprocate than love that you seek. 
2. Be kind to yourself
• Another late realization that has made me a better friend to myself and others. I put in considerable efforts to be a good friend to others without noticing that the person who needed my friendship the most was myself. It is easy to be harsh upon ourselves because we never have a chance to break up a relationship with ourselves. Which I came to understand as the exact reason why being compassionate to ourselves is mandatory. Post this realization, whenever I have had a bad day and whenever I have wanted to place all the blame upon myself, I have started drafting a mail with the beginning, "Dear Soorya..." And trust me - our inner voices tend to love us more from the 'third person' point of view than from the 'first person' point of view. 
3. Fall Be in love
• It is easy to fall in love than it is to be in love with somebody. It took me countless mood swings, pointless arguments and repeated visits to Kris Gage's beautiful article before I understood that love is not a feeling but rather a commitment. To quote Kris Gage, "Good love is just the everyday — every day." And if one decides to be in love with someone, why not just extend it to all the people around oneself? There is no greater motivation to live/work than realizing that there are thousands of unexplored possibilities to make your loved ones happy. Hence, be in love. Always. 
• Another lesson I had to learn the hard way (and from the above shared Kris Gage's article) was to stop expecting the other person, in any relationship, to be my cheerleader 24x7 for 365 days. After all, the other person is still a person - someone capable of having a bad day, having a sad day, having an exhausting day. He/she is not entitled to be our source of happiness just because we are in love. Our happiness is our responsibility. If the other person also makes us happy, fantastic! 
4. Express what you feel about other people to them
• I remember watching an Indian television show in which an American actress was being interviewed by an Indian anchor. One of the questions was about the actress's married life and she replied that she had one of the greatest husbands possible. Before the interviewer could move on to the next question, the actress quickly asked the interviewer if he was happy with his married life. He replied with a confident 'Yes'. She then asked him smiling, "Did you tell your wife 'I love you!' today morning?" The interviewer responded with a sheepish smile. The actress repeated her question with genuine care.  The interviewer replied with an uncomfortable smile, "We don't do that in India." The actress was taken back. "Don't you guys tell your wives that you love them everyday?" The interviewer shook his head in silence. 
• That interview affected me. That, and another incident. There was a monthly short story writing competition conducted by a newspaper. I submitted three short stories for three consecutive months and for all the three months, my short story did not make it to the top 10 list. On the third month, the day when the results were published online, I felt very bad. That night was a difficult night and as I lay on my bed feeling hopeless, I received a message from a friend, out of the blue, stating that she had come across my blog after a long time and she really loved a few of my recent posts, with one post having moved her to tears. That message - that message that the friend needn't have sent - made all the difference between a happy night and a sad night. I will always be grateful to her and from then, I have always expressed my feelings/gratitude to other people whenever I can
• P.S.: This is more important with family members like parents and siblings who never really expect anything in return.  
5. Understand others. But primarily, yourself.
• Till I went to college, I did not even feel the need to understand myself. But in my college, especially in my hostel, after I was exposed to various groups of people who held very different perspectives on sports or movies or even life in general, from the ones that I held, I made an attempt to understand my tastes and traits. Why was it that I got easily bored by a very entertaining 20-over cricket match but could be extremely engrossed by a slow-paced Russian film? Why was it that I remained abnormally silent during group discussions but burst out with energy during a one-to-one conversation? Why did I prefer being alone even though I absolutely loved every person I met? Why did I have to practice an imaginary back-and-forth conversation before I placed a phone call?  Why could I never grasp sarcasm or crack a joke spontaneously? Why did I want to start a blog and share incidents from my life when I found it difficult to open up about certain things even to my loved ones? Why did I even have so many questions about myself? It was only after I found answers to these questions did I convince myself that there was nothing wrong with me. But more importantly, understanding myself helped me understand others. Whenever I was part of a group activity and I noticed someone being silent and feeling uncomfortable about it, I eagerly extended a hand. Whenever I was part of a group activity and I noticed someone who couldn't help being the center of attraction, I also learnt to appreciate that. Don't all things need love? Be it silence or be it stardom. Be it books or be it parties. Be it movies or be it scriptures. In this way, I have come to love myself for all the things I love, and I have come to love others for all the things that they love. 
6. Listen when you can, speak when you have to
• I must admit that I started out listening to people and their stories without interrupting/advising/opining because I wanted to gather material for my writing. But very soon, I understood that people opened up a lot more when their statements are received with silences instead of judgments. Which led me to get genuinely interested and grateful. In this 'social media' era when we are encouraged to express our opinions on a movie/sport/political issue (which is definitely good in a way), it becomes easier to do the same during conversations. Such an act is welcome in a conversation where one's advice is sought but it hampers conversations where the other person wants to be just listened to. We needn't always be an interviewee in our lives. Being an interviewer also has its own perks.  
• P.S.: Listen to nature as well. The song of a bird and the music of rain also needs an audience.
7. Be grateful for the successes, and more importantly, for the failures
• I used to be extremely grateful whenever I faced success and become extremely sad whenever I faced failure. One day, I decided to sit down and list all the events from my life which I considered to be failures. After I listed them down, I realized something. Each of my failures had actually paved the way for something better/happier in my life. To list a few examples,         
• My failure to secure great marks in my 12th Board examinations and thereby, secure an admission in a Chennai college led me to secure an admission in a college situated about 300 kilometers from my home.  This college changed me in ways I had not imagined and made me a better son, a better friend, and a better human being
• My failure to get romantically involved in a relationship in college led me to take up writing again (a childhood hobby I had given up during my teenage years) and start this blog
• My failure to get selected in the interview round of a Chennai-based organization led me to secure a job in Bangalore and have an amazing 2-year stay with my brother which expanded my views on art and life 
• Failures, in that way, are like Kamal Haasan's films. When they arrive, they are not received well. But a few years down the line, they will end up getting celebrated.
8. Dream big. Dream wild. Most of them come true
• During the first 2 years of my college, I developed an extreme fondness for cinema and also turned extremely introverted. Despite such a paradoxical mix, I would constantly dream of 2 things that I wanted to accomplish before I left college. 
• Talk about cinema and its power to an audience in a packed auditorium 
• Screen a short film/video that I had made to my entire class
• If I had shared these dreams with any of my friends, they would have laughed. And I would not have blamed them. Because I was not a part of any cultural club in my college and I did not make any attempts to start/shoot a video in college till my second year. Yet, the dreams continued and my efforts to understand cinema continued. During my third year, a classmate of mine asked me to participate in a Tamil cinema quiz which I took part in, solely, for the joy of seeing a question paper that contained questions about Tamil films. Unexpectedly, me and my team made it through to the finals of the event and ended up becoming the organizers of the event for the next year. As a result of that, I got to stand on top of a stage in my college auditorium and address an audience about cinema and its power. Something similar happened with my second dream. On the penultimate day of my 7th semester, a dear friend and a classmate of mine asked me to create a farewell video for my class. I went ahead with the exercise not really knowing what would be the outcome but at the end of it, the farewell video ended up being screened to my entire class on a projection screen.  
• Do all dreams come true? Maybe not. But dreams that inspire you, dreams that make you better, dreams that make you work towards them do come true.
9. Say 'Yes' to things that make you uncomfortable (in a good way, of course)
• When I look back at my life, the things that I fondly recall and the things that I am proud of have all happened only because someone forced me or I forced myself to say 'Yes' to them. I signed up for a two-day photography workshop after severe compulsion from a dear friend and I still remember the extreme discomfort I experienced on the morning of the workshop. What if the workshop was filled with terrific photographers and I was the only amateur? What if the photos I captured during the workshop turned out to be pathetic? I had to pressurize myself to turn up to the workshop and after the workshop ended the next day, I was a happy man who had learnt a great deal about photography and had met a few photographers with very different perspectives on photography. Something similar happened on the morning of my first solo trip in 2017. There were numerous fears troubling me. What if I got robbed? What if I got lost? What if I got extremely ill during my trip? I had to pressurize myself to board the bus that afternoon and a week later, I was a happy man with a pleasant baggage of experiences. 
• Adding one of my favorite quotes from the book, The Last Lecture, "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something." 
10. Find joy in the small things
• Once, when I was in college, I was sad one morning owing to an argument with a friend in hostel. After I reached my classroom, one of my classmates noticed that I was not in good spirits and asked me about the reason. I told him about the argument. Later in the day, after the lunch hour, he came over to my bench. He had noticed that I had become cheerful again. "What happened? You seem to be happy now. Did you sort out everything with your friend?" I smiled and gave him my answer. "No..No..I still haven't spoken to him. The reason I am happy now is because I had an amazing cup of filter coffee in our college canteen." My friend stared at my smiling face for a few seconds and then, he walked away. 
• Coffee. Podi dosa. Fallen flowers. Books. Butterflies. Balconies. Beautiful handwriting. Rainy roads. People wearing black colored clothes. My list of things that gift me joy are mostly simple. And more often than not, they help me stay happy most days. I believe that joy from such sources becomes important as we age since we tend to complicate our definition of happiness with more exposure to life. Adding a quote from one of my favorite writers, Ruskin Bond, "And when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful". 
11. Do not idealize your parents
• During a conversation with two of my colleagues a few years ago, one of my colleagues complained, "I just hated the 4 years I spent in college. I wanted to join a different college and I fought with my father for that. But he just wouldn't listen. And I will never forgive him for that." I was surprised by his anger and asked him if he was angry upon his father or upon the college. "Both, of course. But, more on my father. He should have known better." I remained silent and my other friend took over. She asked him, "What according to you was your dad's mistake?" My friend replied, "He should have known which college would suit me better. After all, he knew me from my birth." My other friend got visibly angry and asked him a question. "Don't you know your younger sister from her birth? She's what - in her twelfth grade now? Would you happen to know which college would suit her the best?" My friend tried putting up an ineffective defense. "But yeah..I know what my sister likes. I know what sort of a person she is." My other friend promptly responded again. "But what if she doesn't like the college you choose for her?"  My friend remained silent while my other friend went on. "And tell me this..You wanted to join some other college, right? Imagine your dad had agreed and had gotten you an admission in that college. What if you had not liked that college? What  then? Will you blame your dad for that as well?" My friend did not have an answer. My other friend continued. "First, I do not completely agree that your dad committed a mistake. But even if he had, at the end of the day, your dad is also a normal man, right? He might be 50+ in age, he might have known you from your birth but still, he can also make mistakes, right? Take our manager, for example. He is also a man of 50+ years. He also has more than 20+ years of experience in our domain. But a decision he made last month almost shut down a project. You seem to be willing to forgive him but not your dad. Come on..cut your dad some slack." After she finished, the three of us remained silent for some time.  
• It is easy, especially in an upbringing in an Indian society, to always view a father as a Father and always view a mother as a Mother. Understanding them as individual men and women, with their own set of positives, negatives, and desires makes life easier and happier for everyone.
12. Every person has a story and a talent
• I have always been a believer of this but after I moved to Bangalore and after I started using Ola/Uber at a higher frequency, my belief in this has gotten stronger. After I board a cab and after I figure out that the driver likes having a conversation, I slip in the question, "Aap kahaan se ho, Sir?" (Where are you from, Sir?). That generally suffices and by the end of my ride, I get down at my destination having learnt about the life-journey of another fellow traveler in this world. And I must admit that every cab driver I have conversed with has had such an interesting/affecting backstory that I have convinced myself that the easiest way to overcome a writer's block is to take a cab ride. 
• I remember one December when my friend and I sat down to create 'Secret Santa' chits for my teammates at office. We had decided to assign nicknames to all my teammates and list down a few of their traits instead of using their original names in the chits. After my friend and I had created all the chits, I was pleasantly surprised by noticing how unique each of my teammates' traits were and how talented each of them was. The biggest gift I received that Christmas was to understand the greatness of each of my teammates.
• Never ever underestimate any person. If you tend to feel that a person has an easy life or a person does not have a special talent, just understand that you need to know the person better.
13. Find what you like and have a hobby
• Hobbies really help. For conversation starters. For making a resume stand out. For leading a happy life. I remember many nights when my work had driven me to a difficult place and my writing had helped me recover. I also remember many nights when my work had made me happy and my writing had complemented it. It is very easy to lose oneself in the rat race and I have found many times that my hobby has kept me human(e).
14. Ego doesn't help. Never.
1. Being a single child to my parents and having been doted upon by almost all my family members, it took me a while to understand that I am not the sole special person in this universe. Prior to that, I always held other people's opinions at an arm's distance and I never embraced any feedback which showed me that I was wrong. "How dare you say that I am wrong? It's just that you do not understand me and my circumstances better" was how I would react. I had to go through some failures and some pain and some amount of self-abuse before I could admit to myself that I can make mistakes. It took me some more time after that to admit to others that I can make mistakes. After understanding that I need not always be right, and every person around me is equally special, life has become easier.  
2. Ego in relationships is a different beast. Why should I be the one to text/call first? Why should I be the one to respond first in the WhatsApp group? During my initial college days, I made it a point to respond to any text message only after 15 minutes because I felt that responding immediately would mean that I wasn't really busy (though I wasn't, most of the time). Even in a friendship, I wanted to hold the upper hand. And then arrived a friend in my final year of the college. She was unlike any other person I had come before and she totally destroyed the existence of ego in our friendship the way children destroy the rules in an adult world. "I don't care whether you want me as your friend. You are my friend and that's all that matters to me," she would jokingly say. I understood the power of this statement only during my sad times - the times when I make it extremely difficult for any person to help me or even be around me. It is during these times that each of us need a friend who says the above statement. How great would it be if we could be that friend to others?
15. Pay back your gratitude to the society. Pay it forward as well
• Last year, I came across an article about the efforts of an Oxford University graduate to set up a mobile library in Afghanistan. The attempt to set up a mobile library was owing to the fact that parents were not ready to send their children to a library set up inside a building. In Afghanistan, public buildings can become easy targets for terrorist attacks. After I read the article, I was touched by the extent to which the graduate had gone to ensure that reading became a part of the Afghan kids' lives. I was also stunned by the realization that I had never considered spending endless hours in a library, inside a building, as a privilege. Which made me reconsider all the other gifts from my society that I had taken for granted. My food. My shelter. My education. My job. My freedom. Isn't it only appropriate for me to pay back my gratitude to the society, by helping those whom the society finds it difficult to help?
• My father was a man who always believed that if someone wanted to donate his savings for a cause, he should choose education. He held this opinion because he believed that if an underprivileged kid could be given the right support for education, he could be empowered to improve the state of his family and his society. The empowered kid might go on to enable a few other kids with education which could continue to form a network of humanity. In a twist of fate, after my family lost my father, my family became financially weak and it needed support for my education. Thanks to various NGOs and welfare groups, I was able to have the education I wanted. I also know another friend of mine whose family was in a financially worse state than mine, and he has managed to improve the state of his family now, because someone supported his education along the way. Whenever I meet this friend, after all the chatter and jokes and banter, we end up discussing about any new article that we had read about a social activist or any NGO that we had heard of which was supporting underprivileged families. Isn't it only appropriate for us to pay forward our gratitude to the society, by helping those whom the society finds it difficult to help?
16. Discipline does wonders
• In the final year of my college, I had a routine that I followed sacredly. Every morning, I would wake up at 5:30 AM, set out for a morning walk around my college, capture photos of things that fascinated me, and return to my hostel to read a book or the newspaper (if it was optimistic enough) for about 30 minutes. There were many mornings when I did not want to get out of my bed, when I wanted to steal another half-an-hour of sleep. But I always forced myself to get out and in retrospect, I am extremely happy for my doggedness in my final year. As a result of that morning routine, I managed to publish 85 posts in my blog within the span of 1 year. Which, for me, is a considerable feat since the number of posts I have published over the next three-and-a-half years is about 120. And I know the reason for this decline in output - I simply stopped my morning routine and took a break from being disciplined. 
• Is discipline mandatory for a happy life? I am not sure. But I have found it to be of great help in writing and even in my everyday life. Discipline provides that touch of normalcy in the happiest and the saddest of times. Discipline provides you something to hold onto when life leads you astray and eventually, you make life into such a strong habit that even during the strongest storms, you still find your way home. 
17. You cannot control everything that happens in your life 
• Till I finished my schooling, my performance in examinations was the one thing I cared about greatly. My performance always remained within my control and life was easy. After I entered college, when my priority shifted to people and relationships, life got slightly difficult. Because people and their choices and their actions cannot be controlled. A couple of years back, a dear family friend was diagnosed with a fatal disease. Life got increasingly difficult. How does one control diseases? Last year, a friend had to break up with his 3-year long girlfriend because their families opposed their marriage citing caste differences. Life got unbearable. How does one deal with caste and religion? And then I got my answer. One cannot control everything that happens in one's life. How then does one deal with life? I quote Iain Thomas's lines from his beautiful book, I wrote this for you. "You will only be hurt a finite number of times during your life. You have an infinite number of ways to deal with it."
18. Some lies are good
• I love truth. Simply for the fact that it makes life easier. And up until a few years back, I forced my truth upon everyone else around me as well. I did not care if the other person liked it or not. I just put out my truth and expected the other person to be mature enough to face it and accept it. It was only when I was faced with a few truths that I found difficult to handle did I understand that every truth needed a timing. People generally tend to be pretty harsh on themselves (remember point number 2?) and at times, a lie that can motivate someone or a lie that can lighten up someone is good. At least till the time they are ready to face the truth.
19. Happiness and sadness are internal
• The story writer in me made me understand this. Whenever I got an idea for a short story, depending on the tone of the story - whether it was happy or sad, I would spend the next 3-4 hours listening to songs and recollecting memories pertaining to the tone. If it was a sad story, I would listen to a playlist of songs that made me feel sad and ruminate on incidents from my life that made my heart heavier. If it was a happy story, I would start watching Robin Williams's interviews and I would be remembering memories that made me smile. Through such an approach, I found it easier to enter a happy/sad mind space from which I could write the story in its appropriate tone. And it was during such a session of setting my mood for a story that the thought hit me. If I could make myself happy/sad for a story, why shouldn't the same work in my life? 
• After this realization, whenever something significant happened in my life, I made it a point to understand why I felt a particular emotion. I always ended up understanding that my emotion was owing to a past memory or a future assumption related to the event but never because of the event itself. Our emotional reactions, in that way, are like the manipulative background scores used in films to underline happy and sad scenes. Most of these scenes, when watched without sound, do not actually make us feel anything. It is the background score that directs our emotions. Why then shouldn't we become the music composers for our lives? Fortunately, I have a host of A R Rahman's background scores to take inspiration from.
20. All good things take time
• If someone asked me the question, "What would you never give up in your life?" my reply would be this. "The potato curry my mom prepares." It has become such an integral part of my life that on many days when I have felt sad, I have simply set the photo of my mom's potato curry as my phone's wallpaper and attained peace. Though I hold so much affection for this dish prepared by my mom, during my college days, I would take a dig at my mom saying, "You have been making this potato curry for twenty years now. And you still make it the exact same way. What a bore!" It was only after I moved to Bangalore and started cooking for myself did I understand how difficult it is to achieve consistency in cooking. I then asked my mother as to how she managed the consistency, despite preparing it under all sorts of conditions - with very less time, with all the time in the world, with freshly purchased potatoes, with potatoes purchased long back, while only preparing for me, while preparing for the entire family during a function. My mom replied smiling, "It is because of the same joke you crack. I have been doing this for more than twenty years now." 
• I am generally a person who likes to do things in a slow and unhurried manner. One of my friends even pointed out once that I use the word 'slowly' often in my stories. But lately, having been exposed to a lot of Amazon prime and Swiggy, I tend to get uncomfortable when I see things taking their own sweet time. During such occasions, I ask my mom to prepare her potato curry. When I lay my eyes upon the golden brown beauties after they have been cooked, I tell myself two things. First - if it takes twenty years for something to get this good, then so be it. Second - as a Bioinformatics graduate, I need to identify if a potato-preparation gene has been passed on from my mother to me.  
21. A job is a part of life, not life itself
• There were two incidents that made me snap out of the mistake I was committing - treating my job as important as my life. The first instance was when a dear friend was quitting my first company. Her farewell ceremony was about to be held at 9:30 PM and I had a call scheduled with my US-based client at the same time. I could have rescheduled the call with my client or asked my teammate to take over. But the professional in me overtook the friend in me and directed me to make the client call successful. After about thirty minutes, the client call ended successfully and so did my friend's farewell ceremony. In the next five minutes, I realized what I had lost and what I was never going to get back. The second instance was again after a client call. One of my clients was explaining about a new data security regulation implemented at his organization and I was listening to him with all my attention, not letting myself be distracted by anything else. After the client call, as I began to type the discussion points from the meeting, I was struck by a realization. I couldn't remember the last time, in about a month, when I had paid absolute attention to my grandmother during a phone call of hers. I had always been doing some other work in parallel and had only been partially listening to my grandmother's questions and answers. This want of mine to impress my client more than my grandmother saddened and scared me in equal measures. After that day, I made it a point to never do any other work when my grandmother spoke to me over phone. If I could set aside 30 minutes everyday for a US-based senior director I had not even met, I could definitely spare some time for the woman who had raised me.
• I am not sure if this point applies to everyone. Because I have come across some people who are genuinely in love with the work they do and do not mind letting work dictate all their other choices in life. But for some of us who absolutely love the people in our lives, who measure the success of our lives by the success of our relationships, who love life too much to care more about the experiences than the earnings, who sometimes get the priorities mixed up, I believe this point holds good. Ending with a quote from the extremely moving Tuesdays with Morrie, "Well, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time - then you might not be as ambitious as you are".
22. Do not postpone what can be done now
• My maternal grandfather had always wanted to visit Bangalore - he had a special place in his heart for this 'garden' city. After I shifted to Bangalore for my job, I wanted to invite him to stay with me and take him around the city over a weekend. But whenever the thought arose, I told myself that I needed to move to a bigger/better house and needed to earn more money before I invited him. As a result, I did not invite him to Bangalore for about a year after I moved here and then, suddenly, one night he passed away. Every now and then, the regret of not having invited him to Bangalore hurts me. And it also drives me to act immediately upon something that can easily be postponed, and later regretted. That apology to that friend can be asked now. That family trip, paid for with your salary, can be had now. There will always be tomorrows but our desires tend to have deadlines.
23. Every person's problem has a different solution
• One of my dear friends told me this. I was sharing a problem in my life with him and he narrated a similar problem that he had faced earlier in his life. After explaining how he had overcome the problem, he told me, "But, Soorya! I am me and you are you. What worked for me might not work for you. Every person's problem has a different solution." Which I stand by till today. There are no rules for life. There are only guidelines. How we put them to use in our lives depends on our understanding of ourselves.
24. Some of your loved ones would leave you. Some may die. Life still goes on
• I had a very close friend when I was in kindergarten. We remained friends for about three years and after we reached the second grade, I concluded that it would be impossible for me to attend school without my friend. The next year, his father got transferred and my friend left my school. I was heartbroken and cried for many days. At that point, I decided that I would not be able to digest another departure of a loved one. Post my decision, I have lost my father and both my grandfathers. And I have lost a few other loved ones too. But my life goes on. It goes on with the memories of the ones who left and gratitude for the ones who remain. With every death and separation, I learn to value the love of the people around me more. 
25. Life is wonderful
• Life is absolutely wonderful. In the pursuit of more success, it becomes easy to lose ourselves in the next goal. I agree that goals are good motivators but time and again, it is also necessary to look back at life and be grateful for all the things that turned out good. That one person you love - imagine the odds of him/her being born and brought up in such a way, being influenced by friends and society in such a way, being shaped up by school and college in such a way, being affected by books and films in such a way that he/she turned out to be someone with whom your likes and dislikes matched. That one dish you love - imagine the odds of it being invented by some cook centuries or decades ago and having been passed down from generation to generation, without it having been lost to time or gone out of popular demand, for you to be tasting it today. That one city you love - imagine the odds of it having such a geography, such a culture, such a group of people and buildings, and not having been destroyed by a natural event, for you to explore it today. That one piece of art you love - imagine the odds of the artist having lived such a life, having chosen such a profession, having been affected by such an idea for you to cherish it today. Life is absolutely wonderful. And how can it not be, when I have lived to become me and you have lived to become you?