At your Dashing Mid-life Crisis: “If you were to meet with your younger self, what would you tell him?”

“If you were to meet with your younger self, what would you tell him?”

“Tan-tanan mo nang kawalan ng pangarap sa buhay, tingnan mo tayo ngayon, pariwara! Tulog ka kasi ng tulog! Sarap mo kutusan!” =))

Joke lang. Baka ‘Pag kinutusan ko s’ya, tumagal yung bukol at umabot yung kirot hanggang sa’kin, bilang ako yung future nya. =))

It’s December again. Time to meet up with your younger self and review that same crappy lists of what you both wanted to accomplish out of your messed-up life from the Months (years) that passed, to create another crappy list for the next year. End of year review kung baga. And the vicious cycle goes on.

But This December is entirely different for few of us. It’s the unveiling of the “Mother of all life reviews” as you gradually embrace your early 30’s next year. Yes! Your Early THIRTIES. (BRB, Let me just get a tissue. Ang sakit-sakit nito sa dib-dib! =))

When you look back to when you were just that care-free you, who has no other things to think of but baon, school and school trips, it would be hard to imagine waking-up one day and being estranged to that person gracing you on the mirror. You might take a second or even a third and fourth look on who it is, since he doesn’t even reflect what you thought yourself should still be. It’s a paradigm shift of reaching Eric-ericson’s deadline. Your sweet mid-life crisis. And you come to realize the good reason why it has been called “CRISIS”.

Before I yelled freedom from College, I listed down all those beautiful “Castles in the air” kind of goals. I wrote that I wanted to pursue another course (since there’s really no money in my first one. Mag-didildil pala kami ng asin sa course na’to. Lech.), the usual buy this and that when I reach 25 and be this and that come the year after. But, true enough, I built beautiful “castles in the air” that flew off and did not even leave any signs of actualization today. They were blown out by the rapid passing of years. (Puro drowing lang kasi).

When you stop counting your birthdays at the age of 21, your “friends getting married and inviting you as a ninong” forces you to make that accurate re-count of what your age really is. That clingy feeling to the genre of the 90’s; the hair follicles bidding “goodbye!” and hair lines/wrinkles on your brows saying “Hello!”; All these slap you with the shear reality that you’re not getting any younger.

And now that you realized your lapses, that imaginary Calendar would show-off, beat that buzzer and stop you from picking your broken self up, as it tells you that “Oops, time’s up! Game’s over for this round!” Epal lang di ba?

But I guess, the game has just started. It’s just that there are new rules and the battle ground has just been a little messier. This time, “trial and error” is no longer at play as there’s not much time to be care-free.

This time, I would like to do something that my younger self would come to appreciate. He might look at me in awe and stand there with not much to say as he has always been timid, but there’ll be this ‘AHA’ moment when he would grab me by the hand and say “GOOD JOB! NO MATTER HOW A LOSER YOU WERE, THIS TIME, YOU STILL FINALLY DID IT!”.

We all have regrets in our lives. Some of them are still workable; yet some, you could no longer do anything about. We sometimes blame our younger self of why he was not able to do this instead of that, but when you reach 29, you suddenly feel the need to come to terms with your past. If my 29-year-old self were to meet with that 12-year-old boy who had written the first “castles-in-the-air” bucket list, I would have to tell him these:

1. “Thank you for not being any more “pasaway” than you were. But I hope you could have been more decisive and consistent in knowing and achieving what you really wanted to do in life. It was OK to be run-in-the-mill and went off with a happy-go-lucky mantra, but there should have been times when putting your goals into perspective and seriously putting substance into them could have been more helpful for me as the present you.

2. Save up at least P10 a day. You wouldn’t imagine how much of help it would become in the future.

3. Cherish those shiny, wavy hair. You would have to inevitably bid goodbye to them no matter how you hold on to that hopeful creed of “save the hair follicle foundation”. =))

4. Take pictures of your loved ones and friends. You wouldn’t know when they may opt to go out of your life or when fate would take them permanently away from you.

5. You could have been a hard-working teacher. A fulfilled professional. But, that’s all there is to it, hard work. I wouldn’t blame you to deviate from your vocation as you had no choice. Good Job on being flexible and coping-up with any given fields you thought would be more suitable not with what you think your calling was but what your needs financially are.

6. This is my most important advise to you young man! Be friends with your pimples. Like the ones you love, they are not to stay there forever. But if you fight them off, they would have to fight you back with full force.

7. I would like to say more but I guess, I would have to let you be, since I am still thankful that had you known all these, I wouldn’t be who I am now.

How about you? What would you have told your younger you?

-JMDC =)

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