A road less traveled

At the sudden burst of memory flashing back to that two years of his life, he stood up and searched for his pen. Grabbed it and started scribbling. Those two years was a time that changed his view of the past to an optimistic one; it was a view of what happened to him from his earliest memory to that time when he was in the seminary. Well, it was a particular view of the past, a kind of act that entails a constant struggle to think optimistically. It was as if a struggle to keep that perspective in mind while living under the gaze of people who may have always have something to say and judge about him. 

It was a struggle to maintain an illusion in mind. It was an illusion without any impact on him but it is an act that kept him focused on his vision and dreams for the future. Indeed, it was an illusion - an 'opium of the people'. But what is real? What is genuine and true? If one does not fight for something to keep it real and true, it may fall into illusion anytime and his experiences be labeled as falsehood and only a hallucination. 

But then again, what is an experience that does not appear to be an illusion? What is an experience that is forever real and authentic?

He thought of these because in the four decades of his existence in this strange but familiar place called Earth, having been born in Southeast Asia in the Philippines, he has struggled to keep those dreams in his mind who appears to be illusions only if he did not act on them.