Decision

It all starts with one choice. The choice can be yours, it can be someone else that makes the decision that affects you. Whatever it is, the choice is made and things never go quite as well. Where once you were happy, you feel constrained. Where once the Earth barely touched your toes as you scraped the stars with your fingertips, you now feel like Atlas with toes scrambling to purchase at nothing. Everything is on top of you.

And you think that things will change. You might even start off hoping that things will change. The hope wears off and glazes into a harden shell as time passes. You're in a rut. You're stuck. You have no idea where the rut is going and you can barely remember where the rut began. You feel powerless to change it. You begin to hope for hope. In time that becomes a glazed shell that deflects the light from your being. You wonder in some aspects of your world whether you exist or not. For fear of finding out you don't exist in those worlds, you shut them out.

Your life is busy but it isn't full. Your life is fast but little is accomplished. Bad things happen and it becomes easier to simply shrug and trudge on with your life. The acid of life having eaten through the very heart of your being, you become the glazed shell - the hollow one - that which has no center. You become the life that you used to wear and don't realize that it is armor against the very change that you once wished for.

You think about this every so often. And you hope one day that you'll bump out of the rut and do what you're so afraid of doing but wish to do so much. The shadow in the shell claws its fingernails out trying to break out. Powerless only because you forgot that power that once shone through your eyes - your real eyes, not the dull orbs of the armor of your life.

Every day you choose to stay there, you will. That applies at a personal level. This applies at a group level. That applies at a societal level. That applies to everything.

I remember when I returned to Trinidad. It was part of a year long negotiation between the old man and myself - on the phone, he would tell me how great things were and that he wished I was down here. After a year of that, any well intentioned son would consider it. And the potential was supposed to be there; Trinidad was supposed to be an internet hub in some of the original plans I had seen in the 90s.

And I wanted to start my own software company. A proprietary software company, back then, doing contract work and competing with the folks in India. It seemed possible over the phone, my father being the bright ray of sunshine that he could be when he believed in something. I'd seen it before. In the 1980s, when he was trying to sell Rain-X down here and no one was buying (and for a while there during this decade, guess what? 20 years later...) When he was starting the advertising magazine from within this same house, the 'Trini Trader' - and when a fellow named Jeeran Singh hosed him on that by doing sales and pocketing the money. 'The Solar Company', where I wrote his business plan and when the bank wouldn't loan him money because of the collateral... it was my issue with the business plan. Someone had to be blamed, I suppose.