Clarity of Mind
There's a clarity of mind that comes after chaos or after something terrible just finished happening, that we don't talk about it quite often.
After last night when I was approached by the guy who has a gambling problem, he had said something to me that kinda stuck. He said that right after he was done using all of his money, that was when his eyes opened, almost like he had been blindfolded this whole time, and now he could see perfectly clear the mistakes he had made and how dumb he was to make them.
Funny enough, he isn't the only one something like that has happened to before, because it did happen to me and no, it wasn't gambling related. You see back in the day when I had just finished high-school and could rarely afford a phone for myself, a friend had gifted a phone that had one leg in its grave already.
Almost everything about this phone was damaged and I had to hold it together with a rubber band. But in as much as that phone was in that terrible state, it was my most prized possession at the time, and this was because I knew I didn't have money to get a good phone and that my parents had better things to do with their money than to waste it on getting me a phone.
Well one day, while everyone was at home, there was no power supply as usual but my neighbour upstairs had turned on their generator. So I had called my little brother and carefully handed the phone over to him to go help me charge it at their place.
He went, gave them the phone and came back. About an hour or two passed and I asked him to go get the phone back, only for him to hand it to me and it refused to turn on. It turned out that on his way to go charge the phone the first time, it had fell from his hand and he had picked it up, gave it to them and just left.
That phone never recovered from that fall and trust me when I say that that was one of the moments in my life where I had my greatest regret because few hours after all that happened, the power got restored and I found myself regretting asking my brother to go charge the phone in the first place.
All of a sudden I could see things clearly, I could see that all of this was my fault, that if I hadn't been impatient in the first place, I wouldn't be in this situation that I currently was in.
It's crazy how we get to understand these things mostly after we're done doing that stupid thing, after it's too late to stop ourselves from making that mistake. But then I guess that's why it's clarity of mind, because in order for you to clear something, there have to be something there in the first place..that is why it comes after you're done doing that stupid thing and not before.