Life: A Carousel of Old and New

While scrolling the picture carousel on my cell-phone, I re-lived each and every moment of my life so far. Desperately and passionately we tend to make memories because they say that memories never die. They don’t, I agree, but why didn’t anybody tell us that the memories sure do live, however, the people we make memories with, would all leave. Not all, I would like to add, some stays.

I still remember how I struggled so hard to convince my dad for purchasing a vintage polaroid camera. “We liberate our life by capturing the moments in it,” I exclaimed enthrallingly to him. However, I was too innocent to understand the weird, mean smirk on his face at that time which low-key offended me and I confess calling my dad a boring sloth who doesn’t get excited that easily as me. Some lessons are learned throughout our lives, slowly and gradually, whereas, some lessons are hard-learned and they are the ones that tend to hurt the most. 

Scrolling down the pictures, as we say in sciences, I only found some constant variables as my Family and some friends, while the rest of the variables kept on changing with time, age, and distances. The pictures of our secondary school graduation were full of colors and uniform artistry that said very main-stream things like “Forget me not,” “You will always be my best friend” and the funniest expression in this world, “I would never be able to forget you.” Looking at the pictures of postcards and signed uniforms full of such humorous slogans made me feel awfully mesmerized as well as low-key wicked when I realized that none of those “best friends forever” are anywhere to be seen now. None of them contact me, and neither do I. There have been strange incidents where my best friend crossed me and didn’t even bother to say hello to me because she was with her new fam-jam and best friends forever, while I was with mine. 

They say that if one is out of sight, consider him out of the mind too. I would religiously preach this notion because distance tends to change everything; how we feel about each other, how much do we care, how much time we give to one another and the list is long. We even forget the faces of each other in no time and if someday, and that too by chance, we see each other in our dreams, for the rest of that day we can’t believe that we actually remembered the face of our best friend from grade 5 who ate, slept, studied for 7 hours daily, played, did homework, quarreled, went to the cafeteria, and even bathroom with us for whole 5 years. Insane, right?

This is how we humans have been programmed. We might call it cruel but believe me it is the best feature available in the market so far. If our mind chips did not have this inbuilt feature of forgetfulness, trust me most of us would have been living in dire misery. We forget so that we could move on. We forget so that we could start fresh, bring the change that we couldn’t yesterday in our devastated lives. A day could be spell-boundingly ecstatic and you might never want to forget even a single moment spent in it, however, another day could be a real-life “living on the edge’ kind of experience and you don’t even like to remember a single second of it. Joy can be found even in the dirtiest corners of a broken house. However, misery is something that can leave ever-lasting imprints on your mind that can only be wiped off with the soothing touch of new, happy memories. So just liberate your mind, and let go of all the happy and the sad moments in your life because the moments that were actually happy can always be felt close to your heart, and the moments that deprived you of happiness, they are not worth remembering at all except the lessons that they taught you.

Life is a spinning carousel of the old and the new. Now I understand the smirk on my father’s face and are well-aware of why he didn’t get excited that easily upon meeting new people and exploring new things, it’s because he had more people out of his life than were in his life at that point. It’s because his carousel had spun longer than mine.