I think, the gist of this post is this: Age catches up with you and it's not a bad thing.
So now that you got the end message, here's the extended version:
If 2012 was the year of all disasters, 2013 was a sobering one for me. Slowly but surely, patterns of thought and behavior which were not beneficial for me were cut, so were relationships and associations which no longer worked within the bigger scheme of things. As someone who is not always comfy with change, it is nice when change is imposed upon me so to speak.
People I have known for two decades were out of my life, business associations which I never thought would end promptly did so, a close relationship morphed into something else and took me a long time to figure where it was going, I - the ever maverick unorthodox one - got faced with what it is to suffer a professional "setback" (for the lack of a better word) but also took that in my stride and somehow turned it into a personal advantage within a bigger transformation.
A friend of mine once said he was like Tarzan, he would hang on to the nearest tree branch - meaning accept any business association offered to him regardless of how beneficial it is. Maybe the analogy is correct in my case, I tend to bee too loyal to people or institutions - but "is this a dagger I see before me?" Actually, this is not a dagger "before me" but rather "behind me" because I ended up being stabbed in the back and still have the scars to prove it.
But, to my credit, I actually did learn something. Who said one cannot teach a 39 year old dog new tricks? One can. You know those motivational words we see everywhere? Well, I am not a big fan of them (to put it mildly) but someone told me not long ago "Tarek, there's no such thing as bad years, there's years which are badly understood". How wise.
True, taken individually I can see the events which happened to me as "bad" but comparatively, the whole set of circumstances simply piled up to create a tipping point which was inescapable and which there would not have been a way for me to cut lose of all those influences which were bringing me down."In the old days we would have called this selling out, but I think it's a good way to spend a Sunday" said rock legend Robert Plant upon accepting a Grammy award in 2009 (for "Raising Sand" with Alison Kraus), true, with age things we thought were totally incompatible with out character or our norms end up making sense.
I think one of the reasons why I am writing this today is the interaction I had with fellow blogger Gino Raidy on twitter yesterday. I truly respect every blogger trying to make a difference, but let's face it - none of us invents gun powder - we are all indebted to a previous generation which has paved the way for us to mature and take the positions and views we take today. And if some of us do not have neon-signs as to what they have done in the past or keep hammering achievements on innocent bystanders, and if some do not live wild lives under the intagram-twitter microscope, it does not mean they do not do so by their own terms and conditions.
And within the tumult of everything that has happened previously, I am now at peace with the turn of the events. The year 2013 taught me that world domination would have to wait, first "let's cultivate to our garden" - how fitting that as I grow older - the maxim which ended Voltaire's Candide book makes sense more and more to me!
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