Turning Back Towards Turning Points

In a few months, I am going to begin a brand new decade. It stretches before me untouched by choice, a clear road I can twist and turn and bend at will. Perhaps, it’s this generosity of time that is forcing 2016 to be a year of reflection. I keep looking back and my Turning Points leap at me with breathtaking clarity. Decisions I made at different moments, which changed my path forever.

I think for the past two decades I have been on an accelerated impulse mode. I have followed every whim and fancy, thrown caution to the winds and raced ahead to keep pace with a journey I intentionally took. I have never looked back before and it feels strange to half-turn around and see a life, my life, with all its jumbled bits and odds on the road behind.

I don’t think these Turning Points are good or bad. It’s just what each one of us was capable of choosing at that particular point. These moments do come with a dominant texture - regret, joy, helplessness, gratitude. I hope as the years pass, they will all dissolve into one large lump where these intense emotions are wiped out to leave behind a bearable, smooth surface called nostalgia.

It’s not just we who have Turning Points. Our families carry them too, an invisible structure, eternally attached to our DNA. Where their choices have shaped ours and it’s all an interlinked chain of reactionary lives. These Turning Points needn’t be only about action. Sometimes they are about inaction. And this resolve to do nothing can turn everything and point your life in a completely different way.

So far, I would have had 5-6 Turning Points. I am told this is an unusually high average. Most people I have spoken to, talk about 2-3, always with a wistfulness about the roads not taken. My friend reassures me, though, ‘It doesn’t matter whether we took the roller coaster or the highway.’ I hope she is right, considering she claims to have had 12 of them.

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This year I know I have slowed down, consciously. I am watching everything. When I make a decision I tell myself, ‘This could be the Turning Point’ and I look at what I am about to do again. However, I know no matter how much I stare and stare at the choice, no matter how I turn it around in the palm of my hand, no matter how much I analyse and understand, a Turning Point can only be seen in hindsight. You have to take the turn to know it is one.

Still Figuring It Out’ a funny, sad, questioning take on adulthood will appear every Saturday on newsable.com. Arathi Menon is the author of Leaving Home With Half a Fridge, a memoir published by Pan Macmillan. She tweets at https://twitter.com/unopenedbottle. The views expressed here are her own.

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