1:28 AM, Austin
My sister came to town with her friend for the weekend, Austin nightlife, see what the city does. We hit 6th Street, wandered around the west area, and they went into a bar. I didn't feel like it, so I just walked. A couple laps of the same block.
On the second lap, I passed a sandlot of food trucks and stopped. Second guessing myself if I wanted water.
A random question
There were two guys on a bench between the trucks, around my age, one from Afghanistan, other from Kuwait. I went to order a water, and the guy behind the counter, the Kuwait one, took my order and disappeared into the truck. The Afghan guy on the bench looked up out of nowhere and asked: "Bro, what do you do for your skin? It's glowing."
I laughed, chuckled about it. I told him I don't do much, maybe glycolic acid if I had to name something off the top of my head (in hindsight it was probably a mix of oily type skin??). We ended up talking about skincare, face fat, weight loss, the whole thing. By the time the first guy came back out and sat down, I was already into it enough to ask if I could just sit for a minute.
Four years, every day
I asked the guy who took my order how long he'd been working the truck.
Four years.
I assumed summers, weekends here and there. He said no, every single day after school, and on weekends he drives down from San Marcos. He'd park, come work the truck, and go back. Every day. Both of them were running family businesses, actually. That's what they were out here doing at 1 AM.
My heart genuinely sank out of respect. There's a word in Hinduism, dharma, for the duty you're born into, the responsibility you carry because of where you come from and what your family needs. These two did it just with the thought of duty.
I kept thinking that I genuinely couldn't do that
Pre-med, 2.7 GPA, no breathing room
He told me he's pre-med. Struggling. 2.7 GPA.
I didn't react to the number, it genuinely didn't matter to me in the way it might to someone else. But looking at the full picture: pre-med curriculum, the academic pressure with it, and then after class, a two-hour round trip to Austin to work a food truck because the family needs it, there's absolutely no bandwith at all to just let go. Like genuinely how do you do everything?
An opened door
Before a customer walked up and pulled him back to work, he asked me something directly. Politely, genuinely. "How are you able to pay for college?"
I told him the truth, my parents cover it. I'm grateful. It's not something I have to figure out.
He nodded and said: "When you don't have to think about that, you can actually focus. On school, on everything."
Yeah. Exactly that, it takes the weight off your shoulders.
What I took home
Isn't it so interesting that time and time again, your trajectory is decided before you can even make a single choice. Not entirely, people push through circumstances all the time, but the weight you're carrying shapes everything right? Like think about it, what you can study, how much you can focus, your risk appetite, when you can stop.
These guys are carrying real weight, something I couldn't fathom to do. They're doing it with a kind of quiet dignity that I don't think I fully appreciated until I sat on that bench for twenty minutes.
Glad I stopped for the water.