My future yellow umbrella

The yellow umbrella, a symbol of the promise of the future.

To understand the yellow umbrella reference, perhaps you should read a bit about it. However, I must warn there may be spoilers for non-How I Met Your Mother fans.

It was the beginning of the summer when I decided to start watching How I Met Your Mother. I'd never thought much of the show, never wanted to spend much time with it. After seeing an episode here or there, it seemed like yet another multi-camera sitcom with a built-in laugh track and little desirable comedy. I guess you could call my taste pretentious; I certainly wasn't willing to accept that a show in (what I assumed was) a traditional format could engage me much.

There have been many times in my life when I've misjudged, assumed and downright falsely postulated about things before actually giving them a chance to prove their worth. It's human nature to trust our initial impressions, to judge swiftly and move on.

But I think my rightfully-discovered passion for this show has come just at the right time, coinciding with some general life troubles.

I've been thinking lately about that quote from The Great Gatsby: "I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." How much simpler life would be if I could take it all in stride and see it through rose-colored glasses, with a lens of silliness to shroud my sensitivity.

Being an unlucky sort of person, I was both blessed and cursed with a hopeful yet future-fearing outlook, capable of feeling in equal parts excited and anxious about what lies ahead.

This has manifested itself lately in a few episodes of what I can only deem as minor depression. I'm constantly worrying that:

1. I'm not on the right path to happiness in my own life
2. I'm not going to figure out the correct path in time
3. I'm putting a burden on others because I'm in a sorry state

Nothing seems to reduce the constant fear that I'm doing everything wrong, save for distractions. One of those distractions that I've had since the beginning of the summer was How I Met Your Mother.

Contrary to my previous beliefs, this show has more depth than it does foolishness. With eight seasons under my belt in three months of watching, I feel confident in that assessment. I'm also confident in the few things I've walked away having learned from my time spent immersed in the story of Lily, Marshall, Robin, Barney and Ted...mainly Ted - the romantic lead and narrator behind the whole story of How I Met Your Mother.

I don't like to think that life is all about finding a mate. Surely there is more to the future than getting married and having children. I'd like to think that my existence has more significance than to simply perpetuate my species' existence.

However I have always believed that there is someone out there for me, somewhere. And though this potential "soulmate" has eluded me these 20 years, the blank space they leave in my life has never lost its potency.

My biggest worries lately have been about finding my way in life, and choosing a career path that suits my needs and grants me happiness. But that's only half of the journey.

Watching the eighth season of HIMYM today, I reminded myself of all the hopes I've had since I started dreaming of a lifetime of wedded bliss. Planning out a fake wedding to my favorite pop star at 10 years old was just the beginning, but that dream never really fades.

I lost my way a bit when I was uprooted a few months ago - I started to consider a different career path, had to think about dating again (and the Lord knows I hate dating, at least when it comes to the modern sense of the word) and most recently I've felt a strain in some of my relationships with others.

All of the uncertainty has been piling on me, and the pressure of it only gets stronger with time. I try to watch television or surf the internet, anything to take my mind off of troublesome mysteries. But then in a strange turn of events, my escape (in this case a TV show) brings me right back to where I started.

It's hard to tell whether that's a good or a bad thing yet.

I made a mistake in thinking when I started watching How I Met Your Mother that it would be a retreat from the doldrums of daily life. In actuality, that's quite a bit of what the show is. There are antics galore and lightness of course, but HIMYM is all about the build-up to that climactic moment of clarity and happiness. This isn't just the story of Ted Mosby's life. This is "How he met his kids' mother." And throughout much of the show's timeline, his character mopes around complaining about not finding his life partner, not making it in the architecture world, not fulfilling his dreams.

That's where we're all at, isn't it? At least, many of us. We're living in an incomplete moment, feeling uneasy with the current circumstances, judging the future on a set of data that is incomplete.

This is the problem with my perception of things at present.

I'm so concerned with the future, with how things are meant to be, that I'm no longer considering that where I am now is not the be-all, end-all.

The only reason I really have "life troubles," as I see it, is that I'm too short-sighted to realize that the issues I'm facing now are only temporary, and that as time progresses, so will I. Eventually, this part of the story will be the extended cut of my own "How I Met Your Father" or "How I Got My Job" or "How I Made a Life For Myself" story.

Who's to say that these troubles aren't exactly what I need to get me where I need to be?

Above all, How I Met Your Mother is about retaining hopefulness despite the mundane and uninspired daily existence that makes the present seem to drag on and the future so unreachable. All the mistakes, all the terrible and disheartening experiences - well they are necessary, because they bring us to where we need to be.

Even though I'm currently in a false state of on-and-off sadness - one that is, in my opinion, not grounded in any sort of logical thought - it's only because I'm in the in-between stage and I don't know that everything's going to work out just yet.

But if I really look inside myself, I can see that mine and Ted Mosby's stories aren't that dissimilar. That nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach suggests there's a dream out there waiting to be achieved, and if I just stop being impatient and keep trying my best, eventually it will work out.

Life may not be simple. It may not just fall into my lap and it may never make sense why I had to go through this period of uncertainty and fear just to arrive at contentment. But it makes some sense to me now that if I just weather the storm, I'm going to come out with a yellow umbrella.