Milestones are good beings. Not only they tell you how close you are to your destination, but also how far you have come from wherever you were. They don’t travel themselves, their life’s purpose is to remain static. It is the static of the milestones that pushes people to achieve them. Imagine if milestones were also on the run like us, there wouldn’t be much of an achievement then. Selflessness, that is what we ought to learn from milestones.

This blog has achieved a milestone today. This post that you are reading right now, it is the hundredth post of this blog. It has taken almost three years to achieve this feat. I started this blog in March 2012. The idea had been lingering in the vast empty halls of my mind for more than a year before I registered the domain name. What took me so long? I wasn’t taking out enough time to write the kind of stuff I wanted to write for this blog. This blog contains the weirdest ideas, experiences and stories about almost everything. I confess that all the ideas didn’t originate in my mind, but the ideas that I shared had me thinking and I thought if an idea can make me think so hard, it must be shared with the world, or atleast put up somewhere, where someone can read it, and think.

In some blog posts, I shared my views about things that irritate me, like organized religion, concept of god as a physical being, social how to do’s and how not to do’s and I garnered unwanted attention from people. I received hate messages on Facebook, hate comments on blog posts and all this rarely bothered me. But, as I continued expressing my thoughts, my behaviour began to change. I became fearless. I stopped thinking about consequences and started doing what I felt like doing. And, things began to change around me. I realized that as my thoughts were getting the shape of words, a new life was being carved out of my current life. The excess baggage was being taken care of automatically. I started reading a lot, I started writing a lot, I started meeting new people and for the first time in my life, the dream of becoming a writer appeared to be achievable.

It happened. I got published. It was not a solo project but it was as good as it could be. It showed me a glimpse of the future ahead and it looks promising. I am going to start another blog this year because I have an idea constantly running marathons in my mind. I am going to finish my long pending writing project as soon as possible. I am going to resign from my job and pursue my dream of living in a cottage on a hill and stimulate the minds of as many people as I can. It is achievable. I do not yearn to be famous, I yearn to be noticed. I yearn to be taken seriously and to be given importance. I do not demand respect, I demand an audience. I do not want to be read, I want to be heard when I am read. I want to be understood. It is all achievable, but it requires effort to keep hitting the keyboard everyday or letting the ink flow out of my pen. The more I share, the more I will be read. The more I will be read, the more I will be accepted or rejected. Acceptance and all is perfectly fine, but it is the rejection that excites me the most because true art always comes out of rejection. Rejection is the carving tool for an artist.

I do not understand what people mean when they say that they have set up a milestone for themselves. People talk about definitely getting married next year or waiting for three years before they decide to have another child. How can someone set a milestone? I see it in a way that a person has a milestone in his hands, he visits the future, places the milestone there, comes back to present moment and starts walking towards the milestone he placed. Weird. How can somebody declare what he will do at a certain point of time in future? You cannot! Stop trying!

The logic of milestones is fairly simple. Everything you want to or don’t want to achieve is lying ahead of you. You cannot fix a timeline to reach there. You can reach there or you could never reach there, you don’t know anything about how your life will shape up in the future. If I desire to write a thousand posts on this blog, I can do so, but if I declare that I will write a thousand posts in one year, just think what it would do to me. I can write a thousand posts and may be I end up writing ten thousand posts on this blog but there is no need for me to think about the consequences of not writing a thousand posts on this blog. What would happen if I do not write a thousand posts on this blog? Only that this blog will not have a thousand posts, that’s all. Doesn’t seem too bad. It will still have all the posts that I have already written or I will write in future. So what if wouldn’t have a thousand posts? How does that affect me? If I don’t fix a timeline, it wouldn’t bother me. As soon as I put a date, it will start haunting me. It will become a constant knocking inside my head.

The design of life is spherical. Every moment is the center of the sphere, giving you full freedom to move in any direction and achieve whatever you want to do. You don’t choose your milestones, your milestones choose you. They might be static but they have a calling, it is you who needs to hear it clearly.