Each one of us has a story. Always.
We carry it all the time, we carry it on our faces, we carry it through our actions. We carry it unspoiled by the grasp of any written word, and tell it more by emotions. It’s what makes us who we are, what defines us in the eyes of others.
And sometimes, we like what we read. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes, we are just more concerned with adding value to something that would cough back results we want, that we fail to learn the importance of crafting human connections.
But there are these rare times that we get to read something we end up learning more of ourselves from; and more for ourselves. Stories from people we have never seen. From people we wouldn’t give a damn about.
It was one of those rare, vivid days that I was trying to board the 9 o’clock train for a place about two hundred and fifty miles away. A part of the once-in-a-while sabbatical. It was raining so hard that the asbestos canopy I had found cover under was rattling violently. When I finally entered the station, I was soaked to my bones.
There were a lot of people who had come inside, trying to find whatever cover they could. It was all a mess. There was mud everywhere. My train wasn’t due for another ten minutes, so I found a spot away from all the fuss to wait.
Near to my left, huddled against a pillar, were a man and his dog. A “stray man” and a stray dog to be exact — stray by the surety they were both homeless. They both seemed immune to the world around them, although they themselves looked fairly in need of a dinner they weren’t getting because people were too busy to consider the outlandish figure they might probably see every other day.
I could understand the man had to battle every day to get things we might easily take for granted. He had no decent clothes on, and his eyes were bloodshot with angst. And the dog — it had several patches of hair, and some of skin, lost to some disease, maybe far from medical help to be cured; for all the medical help it could get, anyway.
Obviously, there was one day this guy had woken up, to probably the usual blowing of a train, the usual uncertainty of his life. He had scuttled into one of the trains getting prepped and used its restroom, treated his face to the salty, quirky water that he might call his “bath”. He had then ventured out, into the world, to ply whatever trade he could lay his hands on.
After hours under the sun, it had so far only proved him worthless for money people with decent jobs earn without half as much exertion and work-time.
Before noon, he had somehow pulled about enough strings, and performed enough chores to get a decent lunch. He had settled on a sidewalk to have his meal in the quiet seclusion he’d gotten himself used to. That was when he had seen the brown dog walk toward him, wagging its tail as it did, ears flattened against its skull, and wanting a bite of his lunch.
He had named the dog Brownie, and they had lived together ever since.
As I looked at them, I felt times had been better for them both. There weren’t a lot who would want to give him chores, and money after, when all forms of laborious labors he would wish to apply for would prefer a man who looked like he can get it done. And he didn’t. There were definitely some days they had done better. Maybe “better” to them was more like “less worse”, but they’d lost it.
The man looked like he would love a pat on the back, for someone to offer him a word or two of comfort. As weak and desolate as he was, he had kept himself upright, kept Brownie against his legs, and was rubbing its tummy to sleep.
He seemed to have no say about things in life. He was as unsure about what his next moment could bring as Brownie was about its. The corner he had subjected himself to committing as his “residence” pretty much reflected with his taking the backseat to looking at things with a plausible and stern ambition.
He didn’t seem to care enough, though.
Not that he was long past caring, but beyond his grief, I could swear he had this whimsical thought about life finding a way to present itself to him. He wanted to make the most out of what little the present moment had. Maybe he believed there was nowhere he couldn’t go after letting himself to much toil, even if that meant only as far as having three good meals a day.
He didn’t worry about the next day. He was only focused on seeing his buddy sleep. Maybe that gave him the most out of his moments.
And I thought about myself, about us. We work so hard to have a better “five, ten years from now” when we couldn’t be sure about what the next instant could bring.
What if, by the time we have sacrificed cherishing all the ripe of the present for a better future, we find out we have become too old to live the fruits of our labor?
But these two, Brownie and the man, had no such reservations. They had no blueprints to live by, no more future to prepare for than that they’d wake up every day to the same sun, and the same starvation.
And whenever I get stuck in life, I tend to think about these two. Whenever I think I am being ambitious, I think about how having someone you love to hug for the night can set back imprudent reservations about the endless need for money to keep going. Because they help me return to the reality. And the reality is in the present. It’s in making the most out of what’s right there in front of you than worry about what may never be there for you in the future.
“Future” is something fairly far from reality, probably only a dream of your most favorite kind of dreams.
Do something right now, and that may just be something you once dreamt of doing, something you thought would happen sometime in the future. Don’t do something right now, and keep thinking about what you are going to do tomorrow, and you have already missed out on what you believed would be your future the other day. And you are going to miss out tomorrow’s success for the uncertainty of the day after.
And the next day’s success for the day after that.
