Drift

I've been giving a lot of thought on how things have changed. Oddly enough, nothing is as it used to be, and I doubt that in the near future it'd still be the same. Things change. People change. And I dare say that I too change.

I was inspired to write this down after reading a friend's blog entry. It made a lot of sense. There is a certain sadness when people you were once close to seem to just drift away. In my friend's entry, she talked about people you introduced becoming closer than you are to any of them. Here, it's a bit different, but also the same. Why is it that some people get along better than others. There are people who've known each other for years, and yet barely really know one another. And there are people who've just met for a few days and they're already very close. Does it have to do with personality? I've had my fair share of these experiences. You could even say that I've had so much that it wasn't even fair anymore.

There is a certain quirk in life I've noticed, and I've tried giving it a name. I call it the "Law of Drift." Basically, people drift from one another. A group of friends may be close now, but sooner or later, one will get separated from the group. It won't happen abruptly. It'll take time. But the end result will be that one person gets left behind when the group proceeds to the next level of bonding; a driftwood separated from the collective mass of floatsam. This has happened to me. I drifted, they drifted, whatever. The end result is, we're not on the same current anymore. And that is very sad indeed.

So how do you stop from drifting? I don't think you can stop it. No matter how hard you try, people just drift. Often it isn't even by anyone's choice. You don't notice it until you open your eyes and realize that there's already a huge gap. When that happens, the hard question is, "what do you do?" Do you try to bridge that gap knowing full well that it will never completely be closed, or do you try to drift yourself closer to other people instead? But perhaps the harder question is, "why did you drift in the first place?" You won't often have a straight answer for this because it happened over a good amount of time.

In DotA, when you're in a bad lane and you keep getting nuked to helplessness, there are 2 general things you can do to make sure you don't end up worthless in the later part of the game. You can either ask for help and counter-harass the other team to clear your lane, or just switch to another lane. So which one would you choose?

The life of a driftwood is a lonely life indeed.