The first step to better times is to imagine them

Much has happened since I last connected to my own blog. This proves once again that I am not the kind of person to be remembered for her record keeping skills.
A man died. His death was unexpected and brought immeasurable amount of pain and complication to those bereaved. His death also brought, rather predictable and measurable consequences to his colleagues, once it happened. For one of his ex-colleagues, me, it has given me the emancipation so sorely needed. My career has morphed and prospered since a year ago and there is no denying that I enjoy the sense of accomplishment. But there is also this lingering feeling that tells me.. that I did not pay for this, albeit small and short, period of professional success. Somebody else has paid the price and I am not entitle to claim the prize....   Regardless of how he was perceived at work, there is little doubt that he had been a dedicated husband and a father; one of the most dear quality that our society seeks in a man.  So why am I the one benefiting from someone else's loss?

Ahhhh.... The fact is, the two entities (my career and the bereavement of the family) are not correlated because I did not cause his death (brain cancer, so we were told). The two simply intersected one another through his death. But a human mind, my mind, does not accept such an over simplified mathematical representation. I started to realize that the two line crossing picture could have been the correct one, if our lives can all be described by, or be forced into via a sheer will power, a straight line. I could have cut all ties with the family, just shrugged them off as bygones. They could have shrugged me and the rest of us at work as bygones and moved on. But we didn't. We exchanged calls, invited each other, car pooled. We shared. We kindled. Now our lives have become twisted. At the beginning the twist pitch was frequent, now we only interact once every few months. Soon every 6 months, then just exchanging new year wishes, maybe. But I know that our lives will cross again and again in the future and that these people are part of my future. I can only hope that my imagined better times and theirs have something in common.