I love those moments...

When you want to bang your head repetitively against a hard wall. Really.

Or, as a happy alternative, lay your neck gently against the cold steel of a railway track. And then hope that Sri Lankan Railways is not on strike, again.

As a generally non-suicidal individual, these thoughts always fill me with a sense of being in no control whatsoever of my "Destiny" or life. Like today, for God's sake.

Assume you stand at a beginning of a branching in the road you're taking. Yes, very Robert freaking Frost and all that crap. So, then you try to take road A (Also here, it is assumed that you haven't spotted Road B yet), and as you're going all fine and dandy when POW! you trip and fall and fall face-first into...elephant poop. So now you're filthy and pissed and angry with life and yet not surprised because Life has so far been throwing dung in your face for a while now.

So, you trudge back to the road and stand there glumly contemplating, when it starts to rain, drenching you but also revealing...Road B.This reaffirms your faith in life and you happily set off down the road, picking flowers, strewing them at innocent bystanders, petting babies and other little animals and in general making a grand racket about how great Road B is.

Then, one fine day, you stumble across a by-lane, one that leads you straight into Road B. Straight, clear and obstacle free.

The point of this meandering analogy is lost even on me. However, initial sentiments remain firmly fixed in my head. As of now, listening to a Strauss marathon in hopes of reducing them.

On taking a big step

I don't generally like taking big steps; the idea of them are a little threatening to me and they make me feel like they should accompany big, life-changing decisions, of which I'm admittedly not the biggest fan :)
Big steps are all those which-in my head-are taken by people unlike me; you now, risk-takers, bungee jumpers, people who leave home when they turn 18, who go off to the hills with a man on impulse, people who do crazy things like I don't know, get a tattoo, pierce their nipple, have drunken sex on a beach in Hikkaduwa on an unforgettable evening.

Just not me.

Strangely though, what I have come to slowly but surely realize about big steps is that they are often not as daunting as they appear. Sometimes, in mid-step they are aborted, and you can only hope it's for a good reason.
Sometimes, you have to take a number of small, successful steps which will smoothly glide into a big, gliding glide-step thing.
Sometimes of course, as you're walking along alone, amid the aborted big steps and the mundane everyday steps, you find yourself stepping over a puddle, skipping over some rocks and suddenly on the threshold of something that promises to be a very big step indeed. At this point, the smartest thing to do is probably not ruminate over it too much, but to just say wtf let's do this shit and walk on, walk on, walk on because you can'r go back now.