Other side of 27

I turned 27 a few months back.. And though it is said you should only look at the future and not look at the past - I have not been able to really stick to that. It hasn't been a day of sudden enlightenment - the feeling that you are a senior now kind of starts creeping in even before 27, especially in IT industry where the average age of people around you is not more than 30 and a place where an experience of 3 or 4 years matters and puts you in the bracket of people who are expected to take on more and "senior" responsibilities.

I have found myself looking back at the last 27 years of my life - and actually more so the last 6 years, years post my graduation, 6 years of job and being out on my own in a world apart from the safety and protection of home, school and college. Many times I have heard myself saying - "oh, you know, things were different back then when I joined the company", I have found myself catching up with my old college friend and remembering how it was 10 years back when we first met, and then saying to each other "oh, weren't we really stupid then?"..

Not that I do not do stupid things any more (oh I wish I stopped doing them), but words and sentences like "Experience is the best teacher" kind of start making sense. A lot of things your parents and elders said to you about a lot of things start seeming to be correct. And a lot of it is something you had ignored on purpose as a teenager. You look back and find yourself smiling on that stupid first crush, which never really went beyond those stupid smiles. You look back and find a lot of situations which you know you would handle differently now. You have your share of failures, some big, some small, most of them that will remain with you as reminders of things you perhaps did wrong. You realize your treasure chest of memories is quite big now, memories of friends and people you met and somewhere lost touch with along the way, memories of the academic successes, your first job experiences, memories that often make you smile and cry at the same time..

As one of my friend had said - as you grow, you become less and less flexible. It becomes that much more difficult to retrace the steps that brought you where you are and made you the kind of person you are. You have already been moulded by now, and you start accepting yourself the way you are. Those teenage tussles of coming to terms with people around you and yourself kind of die down. You emerge out of all that - with the knowledge of how and what you are and how much and what you want to achieve.

The best part of being on the other side though is that you know yourself far better, your own failures, your own successes, your pluses and your minuses. And you know from your first-hand experiences that things will go wrong sometimes and that every failure is not and does not have to be the end of anything. The best part is you learn to live and come to appreciate a lot of things that you did not care about earlier. As my friend said - you become calmer - I guess that is what is commonly referred to as "being mature" and "being grown-up".. Well, yes - people like me need to be on the other side of 27 to realize a lot of this!