“Everyone makes mistakes, so no one person is better than the other.”

No hard guesswork; this assertion would certainly raise eyebrows. While you may get on with it, there are few who would rather mock it straightaway. And understandably so; if Abraham Lincoln or Joseph Stalin could stumble and screw up sometimes in life, clearly not all slip ups are equal.

This sounds intuitive on the surface since there is no rust colored fire escape ladder or wrought iron curly cues to help. But surprisingly there is multitude of instances where we simply miss the actual picture. Eliezer Yudkowsky- best remembered for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence, is just as cautious when elaborating; “Everything is shades of gray, but there are shades of gray so light as to be nearly white and shades of gray so dark as to be very nearly black. Or even if not, we can still compare shades and say “it’s darker or it’s lighter”.

To me it measures the same way; like all imperfections are not equal and all uncertainties are different. While it’s not easy to embrace uncertainty, the important thing is what we choose to do with it. Who wouldn’t want to go all out to ease it, knowing that it will never be entirely gone?  Except that this would determine what shade of gray you really are in as nothing is as black, white or evenly gray as you’d want it to be.

Asserting that “I don’t know a shit” or “I don’t give a damn” is something that everybody readily accepts and would easily dismiss your imperfections. But there’s a difference between someone who fails to prove why Earth is flat and someone who falls through in proving the string theory that describes the universe as made up of tiny vibrating threads. Smaller than atoms, electrons, or quarks when these strands vibrate, twist and fold, they create matter, energy, and other phenomena like electromagnetism and gravity.

In any case both would throw up their hands in uncertainty though may secretly hand on to a cocky certainty.

For the most part we live in a world where nothing is certain; we cannot hope to be more correct –only less wrong. It’s kinda default setting where nothing is fully comprehensible. Nonetheless if you could comprehend why nothing is ever black or white, then that’s a great start. But the real shift happens only when you begin to view the world through infinite shades of color.

It’s a difficult road but promises a beautiful destination!

How strange is life, isn’t it? The darkness of the night always relents and makes way for the light of the day time after time. Likewise our endurance never fails to end our labor into fruition. It’s a blissful absurdity but is conclusive to co existing with Nature. I do not freak out easily but I know one thing for sure –there is no perfect way to live your life in a well laid down manner. Our lives are not novels that need to confine to a well defined sequence of chapters. Rather it’s a collection of stories that behold different plots unfettered- in a single you.

I have always felt fragile yet confident in my dealings. My heart could feel the pain of loss and my soul would flourish with happiness when excited. And my mind would eagerly build on rhythms of life that stir and influence my actions. Sometimes things won’t turn out the way I‘d want them to but would often end up in something more beautiful than I could have imagined.

Don’t we all shed every ounce of ourselves to grow into the kind of person that we think we are meant to be? I have always believed in all the versions of me that I’m fated to co-exist with. The most vivid part is that it has helped me to live a happy life even when wading in unknown. I have learned to live in harmony in a world that continues to evolve around me. I guess there is no single identity that I need to hang onto to be sufficient for everybody around me.

When I was younger I wouldn’t stop dreaming of the day when I’d be recognized as a successful writer and my stories being read somewhere one day. Years later today as I look back, I face the younger version of me that had dreamed of his work being recognized and featured. I feel warm and grateful and treasure this vision dearly. It gives me the hope and the strength to continue to desire and work hard and softly breathe my wishes to the world around me.

I am the story that has run into unfinished streams of failure, courage, hope and strength. I’m the eye that beholds infinite dreams. I’m the ambition that yearns for more and has set its heart on living on cloud nine.