#aucardinal14

It’s 3:53 am, June 9, 2014 and I sit in the Midway airport, while Yejoon is sprawled out on 3 seats and Yeryung is on her phone. 

The tour is over. One month of traveling through Turkey, Egypt, and Israel is over and I’m deciding on how I feel about it. Happy? Sad? Nostalgic? Oftentimes, how you feel about something is a decision as much as it is due to circumstances. For me, I haven’t chosen yet.

I am a thinker; some may call me an overthinker; others may think that I think they should think of me as some sort of thinker rather than an overthinking thinker, but that is not the case. The melancholic music playing in the airport isn’t helping at all. Writing my thoughts out is a form of medication.

I suffer from withdrawal symptoms after going on long trips. I think it is more of an issue with transitioning. After much excitement and adventures, life can seem a bit boring back at home. Yet it is easy to try to cling onto those moments, which soon become a memory.

Life is a game of chess. The possibilities are endless. If your opponent advances a knight to a certain spot, he may be doing it in order to catch you off guard in order to get you into a fork involving your rook and king. So you consider castling in order to avoid that situation. Or the knight could have been advanced to control certain central spaces on the board. So you attack the knight with a pawn. Or he could be up to nothing much at all and just moving pieces at random and you just develop your own strategy. There are a million ways the game could go. But you can’t make a million moves. You make a move and the game takes on a certain direction because of that move.

I suppose that is the beauty of life. It presents you with options. The opponent makes a move. Now it’s your turn to decide what you will do. There are tons of ways you can react. Different decisions lead to different paths. But your decision leads your life in a specific direction. Life is directional.

I like to see the future as a tree. You start with a single point and that point branches out until you end up with an exponential arrangement of branches, the kind that live in the savanna. The branching points are the possibilities. Each possibility leads to more possibilities which in turn lead to more and more possibilities.

I like to see the past as a straight line. What’s done is done and what’s done was done in a certain manner. Simply put, the past is not dynamic at all. It stays put. It does not change. A straight line.

The present is where the exponential tree of the future and the straight line of the past converge in a dynamic rendezvous. As decisions are being made, the branches not being used are falling off.

The present is a very exciting place. The future is looking at a game of chess that hasn’t even started yet and trying to see where it will go. The past is a game of chess that is over. The most fun kind of chess game for me is not one that hasn’t even started yet or one that has already ended. The most fun kind of chess game is one that is being played at the moment.

Why worry about the future? Why cling onto the past? Play the game of life now.

Disclaimer: This is not an advertisement for The Game of Life.

It is now 8:49 am in Chicago and 6:49 am in LA. I am currently on the airplane and am 1:10 away from LA, which means we will be landing around 8 am. It’s been about 39.5 hours since we left our hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel, where our traveling journey began. I suppose that it will be about 10 am when I get home today. 3 more hours for a grand total of 42.5 hours. Between the moment when we first left and now, there have been 3 flights, 5 meals, delicious airplane Turkish Delight the best I’ve had, a train ride from O’Hare to Midway, dinner at Joy Yee Noodles via walking and bus with our suitcases, a homeless night spent on the chairs at Midway airport, and a bajillion security checkpoints.

It is now 7:03 am.