Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Trouble With Hello Is Goodbye

It has been almost a full year, roughly, by the end of this month, when by forces of nature or fate or whatever you prefer to call it, that I chanced upon Google forum's THE COFFEE SHOP. The experience has so much influenced me that it was the first post I ever wrote on this Blog: The Day I Joined The Coffee Shop



January 2011 was a critical turning point in my life. My mother had an accident that required a total hip replacement surgery. As a consequence of worry and anxiety, this period started my many days, weeks, of sleeplessness, coming face to face with insomnia and my long-term love affair with the Internet-verse, Blogging and loving it. 


Perhaps most of you who read my Blog are part of this extended community in the Google-hood. And if you're not, damn shame, because whilst The Coffee Shop is still on its last stretch, how I wish you would catch it.  This is where in this virtual landscape, that I met the most incredible, diverse, interesting, wonderful, obnoxious, intolerable and lovable people that ever banged upon a keyboard! 


And then there's the Saturday Night Cafe' cum Bar cum Solace Nook. Where "souls" meet and sing and drink and dance or just pass through. Each soul carrying his own life stories; from the past, from the present and well into the future. A corner, practically a small dot in the Internet, where you get the chance to read about one's soul's search for meaning, relentless pursuit of true love, the start of a journey or the end of one, or simply, where one's soul speaks and another soul just listens.




Ay, there's the rub. You say goodbye, I say Hello. The thing about all good things and all bad things, they all come to pass. Pretty soon, if not right at this moment, the landscape will be changed. How things will turn out in the new landscape of virtual interaction is anybody's intelligent guess. Endings are commonplace, it's a given whenever there is a beginning. Some people would say it is the quality of the journey that counts not how it ended. Some people would say it is how you started your quest and why.


I prefer to keep whatever I have learned and built in the entire journey with me as I move on to the next, for very selfish reasons. I have met great friends and they will all be part of my life's treasures. And no one can take that away from me.


Someone did say something smart, sometime to somebody, "In the end we are all separate: our stories, no matter how similar, come to a fork and diverge. We are drawn to each other because of our similarities, but it is our differences that we must learn to respect." And this sums up my insightful experience in The Coffee Shop. 


American film director Orson Welles has a most logical quote about story endings: 
"If you want a happy ending, that depends of course, on where you stop your story."


14 comments:

  1. "I have met great friends and they will all be part of my life's treasures. And no one can take that away from me."

    Hi Petite,you said ^ that perfectly and I agree ♥

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  2. A nicely written article. Powerful quotes to end the post..

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  3. I will miss the glory days. But I am so grateful for the friends I made.

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  4. i echo you all!!!

    psycho, this had me hurting at the prospect of losing TCS.

    i'm just so grateful i have my friends in G+ at least, you know?

    i'm grateful for all of you xoxoxo

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  5. The few times I have tried to explain to people outside the googleverse the impact an online forum has had on my life, they (with one beautiful exception) looked at me as though I was telling them I had been abducted by aliens.

    It's nice to know that there's a bunch of folks around the world I don't have to explain it to.

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  6. It's interesting, but I've been blogging since Feb, 2010, and though not as personable a presence as you, I, too, have come to learn of the multiplicity of personalities out there. Each with a distinct piquancy that does come through their projection on the screen of this stage.

    In simple terms, you can hide only so much when you're out here, and I've come to appreciate something in almost everyone whom I've 'met' here, and whom I now number among my friends.

    So, I'd like to say thank you to all the wonderful, kooky, twisted, and sincere people I've come to know in The Coffee Shop.

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  7. Hmmmm, are they tearing it down to build a WalMart? I've been gone a while but I always thought it would be there if I wished to visit. Damn progress. Sorry guys.

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  8. I second what you, and every other comment above mine says

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  9. Nicely written, heartfelt 'eulogy' for a place that meant so much to so many... Thank you.

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  10. Wait a minute, the Bar is gone? When? What?

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  11. I am confused... is this a cryptic message warning us of your blog ending? Did I miss the memo? Am I thick-headed? OR Thicke-headed [Alan] ???
    Love the new look here btw...

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  12. ---I hope this is not the end of your blog...

    I Shall NEVER say goodbye.

    I despise goodbyes...I only say Hello. Xxx

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