It’s been a quiet few months here and the last few months have been nothing short of transformative. The last time I was here it was a few weeks before graduation. And I would like to proudly claim that I have successfully graduated with a degree (yea I know it’s just a piece of paper) and managed to survive college without losing my scholarship or my life. 

So just a little recap of all that has happened in the past two months or so. I completed my final projects and presentations, overslept for my final exam, got a haircut and shaved, practiced day in and out for a month for the most significant concert of my life, got together with the one girl who had managed to mesmerise me beyond anything, got a job as a teaching assistant at General Assembly, revamped my wardrobe entirely, cleared out an entire room and painted it (hoping to convert it into a studio), signed up for a half marathon, turned down a job offer at my favourite internship company and started looking for a job. And I wonder why I didn’t have time to write. In fact I’m not even done with half that shit yet. I’ve yet to order furniture for my little mancave, organise my room and belongings, train for the marathon, catch up with a ton of friends, start my own YouTube channel, start investing, arrange a few compositions and covers, stabilise my relationship, work on my photography site, and not to forget…get a fucking job. 

And while most of my friends have been travelling and partying and working after school ended, and I haven’t had time for any of that shit. In fact I don’t even see a need to celebrate as I feel more liberated and changed than anything. Life is amazing as it is and I’m constantly being challenged in multiple ways and learning new things everyday. 

This change has been an absolute transformation. A complete update of the operating system. From the exterior design and interface, to the internal algorithms and workings of the entire system. 

While the external changes are rather obvious (no beard for a start) the internal modifications are the ones which have made an absolute difference in my life. 

One of the key primary realisations I’ve made, as cliche as it might sound, is the importance of living and loving the present. I feel like this has been said multiple times in so many ways that it might seem a little mainstream. But the depth and importance of this manifests in multiple ways. 

And it all begins with our good old friend, the ego. 

The ego is like the code on which the operating system runs on. The hundreds of dependencies that are needed for your system to work. And a lot of times, there are large chunks of bad code written within it, but covered up over other code. And most of the time our personality and UI might change, but the ego remains the same, too deeply integrated into the system to be modified. Sometimes developers are too afraid to touch this code, what if the entire system crashes if I change it? And so they just overlook it and continue building layers upon layers of code that might fix the surfacial errors, never truly tackling the root of the problem. 

And then one fine day, a fine developer decides to take the time to read this ancient chunk of code. He looks at it for a while, understanding the strange functions and operations written into it. Maybe there were certain motivations at that point in time which led to those decisions, but right now this makes absolutely no sense. And he deletes it. 

The system suddenly feels lighter. Runs smoother. And a lot of the errors thrown earlier did not exist anymore. Wow. Instantaneous transformation. 

In classic analogical sense, that was pretty much what happened to me. Happened overnight, and life was never the same again. Of course took me a long while to get to see that piece of code, but when I did I realised my system did not need it anymore and I deleted it. Rest of the ego is still there, just the bad parts which needed to be deleted. 

Not saying that I’m a purely good soul right now, but I feel a lot lighter and better as a human being. I feel more empathy towards other fellow human beings, because that ugly chunk of code was always trying to tell me that I’m cooler than anyone in the room. Something that was written into the system ages ago when I was deemed as uncool. It was a self defence mechanism that protected my core system from damage. But right now there is no need for that piece of code. There is no need to be the coolest person in the room. I’m just me and if someone thinks I’m cool that’s cool, otherwise I really can’t give a damn. 

Once this chunk of code was deleted, suddenly other functions started working better. One of the most important of them was valuing relationships. 

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Since this post is getting longer than I thought I’m going to split it into two parts. So relationships will be covered in the second roll out of the OS update.

Till then, keep glitching.