It was the cold february evening of 2005 when I had just scampered from the parking lot to the entrance of my building. It was a very cold evening, and even with multiple layers of clothes and gloves on my hands, I couldnt wait to get into the building. Our building has two glass doors, one of them which opens automatically leading you to a enclosure, and another door through the enclosure to which an access key is required. As I fumbled to get the keys out of my pockets, since my hands were gloved, the mand behind conceirge desk noticed me and opened the door himself; this was usual – the conceirge desk has full view of people in the enclosure and will many a times open the access door themselves. This usually leads to a “thank you” and then “how’re you doing?” and “its cold/hot/sunny/rainy” discussion with some pleasantries.
Right behind the conceirge desk also lie mail boxes for each appartment – they are different from the normal mailboxes in the sense that these boxes are used only for official purposes and handling of notices from management staff. On any other cold night, if I had opened the door myself I wouldnt have stopped to say hi-hellos, but since the man behind had done the deed, I had to make an obligatory nice talk to him. As I thanked and walked towards him to chat with him, I noticed that all the boxes had a yellow envelope stuck in. Must be another useless notice of fire alarm testing or water pump repairs, I thought while offering my pleasantries to the man.
After indulging myself in yet another small nice talk, the man handed over the yellow envelope meant for my appartment to me – the first look at it, and something about it stuck as odd – normally, building notices wouldnt come to us in such a polite way, but rather on a whilte plain paper with bold fonts – this was a proper evenlope, and there was certainly a letter inside. Must be another of those please-donate-to-building letters I amused myself (ever notice how all charity letters are always politely wrapped in a nice envelope whilst notices are always on a plain paper shouting at you on the face?), and decided to take a look at it once I entered my appartment.
Tearing open the letter in my appartment, I was in for a surprise. This was not a building notice, nor was it a charity letter. It was a “Thank You” letter, addressed personally to me. By the building manager – Elena.
Elena had written that Thank You letter, neatly typed on a nice cream colored paper. As I read on however, it was clear that it was more of a “Goodbye” letter than a Thank You letter. I must admit that she was an excellent writer. Elena was leaving her position as a building manager and would now join college to pursue her degree.
I was surprised – Elena looked old enough to be mother of three; and it intrigued me that why would she leave a good job and join a college again. I kept reading.
Elena talked about the wonderful time she had had in the building and the wonderful people she had met. She briefly mentioned about her co-workers and the work she did. And then she also delved on why at this stage of her life, she had made a decision to pursue a degree in college. Elena always dreamed of pursuing a college degree, but as bad luck would have it, she couldnt finish her college. She had to work her way up to where she was, and it had taken her many long years of her life to do it. But now, it was time for her to stop, go back, and achieve what she had really set out to do when she was younger. It had kept bothering her many a times about not being able to finish her degree and not being able to explore or use her education to something else.
Hence she had made the decision that she would leave the job and go back to college to pursue her degree, finish it and then take her life from there. She wished all of us good luck, thanked us for supporting her, and looked for our wishes in her times ahead when she would go back to college – to begin again. To start a new life, again.
She ended and signed off the letter, with a beautiful line:
“Its never too late to be what you want to be.”
Months ahead, I have lost the letter, but I have not forgotten the content or the message at the end of it. The last line had made me moist even that day – it was the inspiration I had been looking for in my worst times during my weight-loss journey. I had barely begun running, and I was being down with injuries, tiredness and the general sense of failure that I would not be able to reach my goal. And yet, this beautiful piece of line helped me during those times when I felt it was not worth it, or that it was not humanely possible for me to lose weight or when I had to take injury timeouts. I always looked back at that last line and then thought about how many times in my life had I wished i was thin and athletic instead of fat and obese, and yet how many times had I demotivated myself from doing anything about it. Whilst it seemed silly that when half the world around me supported me during those times, it was that line that inspired me the most.
When I think about it now, I have begun to feel that unless inspiration comes from within yourself, it does not matter how much the world supports you or not. Sometimes, somethings as irrelevant as a goodbye letter has the power to motivate you – you just have to look. Once I found the inspiration within myself, it didnt matter what happened around me anymore.
That line helps me to this day, and will forever – there are a thousand things that I didnt do that I wished I had done earlier. A thousand dreams that I wished I lived through earlier. A million things I could have been.
The good part about it though: it’s never going to be too late to be what I want to be.