The Best Thing I Never Had

“What goes around comes back around… you turned out to be the best thing I never had”. Those are the lyrics of Beyoncé’s hit we all know. I am not going to dive into the meaning of song; I think we all understand it pretty well. What I admire about the song is the level of confidence that song projects. Maybe, he was actually the best thing she never had, maybe not, who knows. But having that confidence to feel that there is better out there is really something to think about.

I am not focusing on relationships here; I am focusing on general disappointments in life. Life has the potential to throw us curve balls from time to time and having the kind of confidence that the song exudes really stands to make a difference in how we get up in those trying times.I remember once I dedicated so much time, I mean TIME. I mean I cut my friends out, I cut social interactions out, and I woke up at 4am each day before work to study for an exam. For months, my lunch and dinner partner were my books. I didn’t even know they still produced the morning metro paper. I could not even tell you whether the person I sat next to on a train in the morning was a man or a woman. YES, that’s how much TIME I dedicated. My study sessions seemed to be going pretty well, then the exam came and I didn’t do so well.

What stuck to me like glue was what a friend said to me afterwards, she said ‘maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t do well, maybe that wasn’t for you’. I was in angry mode…thoughts flew across my mind from ‘Do you know how much time I gave to this?’ to ‘How dare you tell me that, if you had dedicated half the time I dedicated, you would have probably given up on life’.

It has been a while since this incident and I completely understand what she was trying to do.  She understood I was disappointed but she also understood that nothing could change that disappointment and the only way I could be happy would be to focus on the future that is yet to be written. And what better way to focus on the future than making the past trivial.  This experience taught me the lesson that my past need not determine my future. I now exude the confidence that my future will always be better than my past and most importantly I choose to focus on the learnings of my past disappointments. I look back at those moments when I was studying for that exam and I realize that I exuded discipline, determination, and dedication amongst other traits that I really should be thankful for.

The result of the exam wasn’t what I hoped for but along the way I gained and developed traits that has made me a better and more productive person; traits that seek to benefit me long-term in both my personal and professional life.

I guess the point of this post is that it doesn’t matter whether the song ‘the best I never had’ is a self-delusional coping mechanism to deal with difficult times or not. Either way, I believe it serves a bigger purpose of focusing one’s energy on the future, not on the past. I leave you with this quote from Beryl Markham:

  “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”