Thinking about high school and college (and the last year) makes me think deeply about the “what-ifs”.

Leadership sessions in ASMPH (yes, we have that) emphasize the need for self-awareness as the foundation for self-mastery, then later on empathy, social awareness, and so on. Every day I feel self-aware, but every day I also judge my past self for being so obtuse about the environment, my friends, myself. In hindsight I feel like I am always lacking in awareness.

In retrospect I feel like I’ve made so many decisions in my life without consideration of others, and even without consideration of myself. From my childhood until very recently –or even until now– I keep acting without knowing what I want, who I am, and why it is I do what I do. It’s very easy to conceptualize a why, especially if you read a lot and listen a lot, but recent lessons made me realize that intellectual knowledge is not the same as emotional insight. 

I can keep coming up with a “why”, and I can even draft my own vision-mission, in accordance and alignment with my friends, community and society… but it can still be meaningless. Then I am left to wonder: if I don’t know why I’m doing this thing, am I doing this only because it’s expected of me? Am I moved and buoyed solely by inertia, set in a path I never really discerned, left to appreciate but never to assert?

We have twenty-four hours in a day, but also 24,000 things left to do. Sometimes I feel like the push-and-pull of a thousand responsibilities move me more than my own will. Who has the time to stop and smell the flowers in medical school? To appreciate the great things in life, to say hello to strangers, to make friends with new adventures?

When the road less travelled requires you to stop and think, it’s so easy to do things by routine. Can I ever really stop?

Twenty years from now I will look back at this post. I fear I’ll wonder how I could have wasted so much.

When I made my first post this month I promised that I will queue up creative things, but I suppose the only thing I am creating now is self-controversy. And a fragment of a poem.

the faster we run to the finish line,
the longer the road becomes
and so a single step’s reach covers the ground of a thousand ones.

the trees blur as i look back at what journey’s come and gone
what roses, what flowers, what sights i have seen–
i can name none.

Log: 04/05/2018
More room for regrets
Originally posted at http://jari-m.com/

Give me your thoughts, as I seem to have none.