The clock struck four and in a secluded office in Colombo, Kelvin made a mental summary of himself......Kelvin, age 29, failed mathematician, indifferent architect, unemployed plumber and now a minor administrative assistant at Gunasena Bookshop in Olcott Road. He felt old and depressed, horrible days lay ahead. People had said he showed a lot of promise when he was younger, then even said that he showed exceptional talent in numbers, where he wondered had it all gone wrong. He had learned the hard way that numbers don't always pay. Some people seemed to think that if you were good in numbers you would be good at anything how wrong they were. Lately he felt tired, of everything in general. A kind of dull ache seemed to permeate through his whole being. In a way he knew what was wrong with him, it was that he lacked common sense. He somehow always managed to do the wrong thing. He didn't know how it happened but somehow if he was in a queue to get chicken people behind him somehow got their chicken before him.
That evening he somehow managed to miss the " Air conditioned express" bus that used the highway and had to take the slow bus through the traffic. It was a particularly bad day. The bus was caught in the heavy traffic in Peliyagoda and it was hot inside, the man next to him was continuously spitting through the window every twenty seconds, and it depressed him no end. Perhaps he had some throat problem and could not swallow, in any case he could not move to another seat because all the seats were taken.
Then another thought came to him, he now felt it was not common sense he lacked but rather social intelligence. He was awkward in social situations, and hardly made any real friends. As one senior manager once remarked nothing ever happened when he was in charge because he did not have any leadership skills. The sun was going down over the sea to the west and with it his mood. Why his mood was related to sunset was always a mystery to him, but when the sun set he felt even more depressed than he already was. Why was the sun so important he wondered.
But then a queer thought formed on his mind, he realized that he always was a man who worried about small unimportant things. Perhaps he should do the opposite. He decided to concentrate on important things. In a piece of paper everyday he would number and write the three most important things that he had to do that day and do them in order of importance before he did anything else. When he had done these three he would relax and enjoy life. The next day he implemented this system and suddenly felt better, in one week his depression had lifted. After one month he found that most of his problems seemed solved, and in three years became one of the happiest people in his Island.
