Stuff

There comes a day in all our lives when we just wake up and feel empty. Like there really is nothing inside us and nothing around us matters. Like we have been living all this while doing nothing that adds value to our life. That day was on december 8th 2014 for Harry Mason.

On the night of December 7th, Harry forgot to turn off the lights in his room because he was too lazy to get up and go all the way to the switches. The heater was set to a tad bit colder than usual, but he did not feel like going to set it to a warmer and more comfortable temperature, so he folded the comforter into two and crawled under it. He had a few books lying around on his bed and the empty plate of grilled cheese sandwich that he had eaten a couple of days ago was on the nightstand beside him. His floor was scattered with tags from clothes he bought with some going back to the days he had just moved in about 7 months ago.

At about 5 am on December 8th, he got up. He had a troubled sleep, due to the cold temperature and the light in the room. He looked around his room and saw all the stuff he had piling around in the room. It was a lot of stuff. it overwhelmed him. Then he realized that he had a lot of stuff piling up inside him as well. Lots of emotional baggage that he has been carrying around all these years.

He got up from his bed and put on a hoodie and sat in the corner of the room looking around at the mess and realized that he was looking into himself and suddenly all his life flashed in front of him.

He was known to dream a lot. He talked of lofty goals and huge things to achieve. He wasn’t the most popular kid in school, but he wasn’t a loser either. He spoke a lot and he always spoke of the different things he would do once he was out of school and the best part about what he spoke was the fact that people believed him. Unknowingly while he spoke of his goals he gave people dreams too. He gave them things to look forward to, to aim for, and they liked him for that and all of them knew that he would turn out fine and realize, if not all, at least some of his dreams, because most of them were incredible anyways.

And then he went to college, and studied hard, partied hard, made friends who stayed with him through thick and thin. he loved every moment of it. Then he got a good job. For the first few months in his job, he spent a lot of time with his friends sky diving, going to raves and just blasted through the weekends waking up with a hangover on monday mornings.He worked, and worked hard. And then, slowly his life started revolving around only these few things. Work on weekdays, party on weekends and the cycle continued. And this brings us to the Monday morning of december 8th. He was still crouched in the corner, trying to hide from himself. Trying to make sense of all this stuff in his life. His mind was always buzzing, thinking of things and stuff which adde nothing to his life. All these years since he stopped dreaming. seemed like a huge deep void to him now. Four years of nothing. He then panicked and started searching within himself for something that mattered that he did in these years.

All these seemed like a really long sleep to him. He then got up and straightened and went through his closet and emptied about 70% of his clothes into a cardboard box, sealed it and got into his car. He went to the nearest homeless shelter. It was 6am and there were not many people around. he got down from his car, walked to the clothes bin outside the shelter and put the cardboard box into it.

If he had to start somewhere, he better start right away. he realized that it was time for him to clean up both his world outside as well as that inside. it was time for Change!