FT Chronicle

I remember Abraham Lincoln said, “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

I gradually grasp the gist of that message in every day that goes by. I started to mature and to know what’s really waits for me out there. But what is really my life in my years?

Being the best storyteller the world has, my grandmother is not fed up with her stories of my childhood. I listen attentively in every anecdote seeing her smile with glee.

But the boy turned into a man and my eyes have been opened wide for the world. I saw what it can offer me, a potpourri of everything. And like every one of us, I also fell into the hole, the pit of love. Like a child that licks his first lollipop, I tasted it bittersweet. Like a moth wandering around the lamp, I touched and I was burned. I’ve been in euphoria all the time. I’ve been broken-hearted for several times. I did spent nights sobbing with my pillow but I do not blame love for anything. It is just unfair to blame everything to love.

As I take the path, I met different folks of different strokes. Some gave torch to lighten my way. Some built bridges to cross over my fears. Some provided plane to soar me heavens. All led me to the path I am taking. To put Kahlil Gibran’s words in my mouth, “My friends are my needs answered.” You don’t speak with them by words but by meanings. And by meanings, they complete your life, they push you further.

I’ve spent most of my life with my most trusted companion, the pen. If there’s an empty paper, I draw there the world and I scribe its history. I write maybe to establish my name in the world. I write surely for one reason: to serve as the lamp to those who are blinded. I want my words to shape a brighter world. I write to make a reason why I am existing in the place called Earth.

I believe I learned almost halfway of what I should learn considering my age. I continue to learn, the knowledge I will never get in school but in the jungle out there.

They say that life is like a river, the water that may pass will never cross the same way again. But I do hope that my life, my message, will make the ebb of the tide. And like a message in the bottle, I hope someone will pick it up and will be inspired in the letter inside of it.

At the end, I think it’s not just your life in your years that matters but also the lives that shared with your years.