I remember, how in that moment I couldn't come up with any severe mistakes to make a list with. But being given a task and being me, I ended up with a list of few things I wish I would have done better. Too bad I couldn't find the list today. (Only a huge pile of other super necessary notes from my past two years that I have lived in my apartment.) However, I remember the feeling while doing that exercise. I felt like lacking something.
Lately, I have been thinking of what do I want to do in the future, and what kind of a person I would like to be, that stuff which everyone is thinking of once in a while. I'm not here to tell you that I would have found an answer, nor I'm here to say that I would be sad about that. What I have found, are new opportunities, new preferences, new things which I have learnt that I actually appreciate in life more than I ever thought before. Maybe I will find a job related to writing, maybe I'll create a career as a mentor, maybe one day I'll find myself teaching people about things I think I have experience in. Maybe it will be none of those.
This summer I worked as a tour guide for two student groups. We had a different cultural background, busy schedule to fulfill and a lot of laughter for weird sentences we made each other to pronounce. We saw a lot of places, we got lost and were hungry. We met many inspiring people, we walked in the rain and we struggled to understand each others at the times. Pretty much everything I could ask for my summer job to be like.
Both of the two groups visited Stockholm, and during the first day in there both times, I had my breaking down point. The first time we realized that we didn't have any local currency in pocket, no working paying cards, and a need to get to the city center after finding something to eat. The second time the first day hit even harder. We had more people, bigger amounts of money needed, and again no working cards - neither for paying the public transportation cards nor opening the hotel doors. And after all of this, Stockholm was a city I really fell in love with.
Today I had a perfectly long meeting, enough to realize how bad I f*cked up. For having slipped through my fingers some minimum requirements, the ship I am responsible for, had started to sink. Given the great opportunity to try out my wings, in an environment which doesn't judge when you fail, I had disappointed the people who had trusted me. For not requiring enough from other people, I was now the one who could receive nothing but severe requirements. In that moment I knew, that even though in the future this failure would hopefully feel as important as tiny shit of a fly, this would be the biggest failure of my life so far. I still wonder, how they trusted me again, though.
On the way back home, the setting for self-pity was perfect: dark roads were wet and it was raining so that my pants got wet and glasses blurry. This was how everything could end. This was something which would never have happened, if I wouldn't have started. This was what I was doing voluntarily, and what I could end at any given moment. And the world would keep spinning, like it would if I wouldn't exist.
Cycling alone in dark, getting wet from the rain, what I did, was that I almost started laughing. Embrace the failure and so on. It all felt so comic. There I was, grieving for my hard little life, like it would be so much easier for everyone else, or for me if I would have made some different choices. Well, no one knows if it would, but if nothing feels anything, who cares anyway.
The next feeling after the random laughter moment was surprisingly pride. Now I would have something for my resume of failure. Yeah, what an achievement of life, don't you agree. But in that moment I realized, how falling in love always requires starting, how it strengthens with enough struggles and continues only as long as the destination is still close to your heart and worth fighting that battle.
What I want to remember from this, is the power of starting and the power of finishing. Without the first one there is no other.
