Just imagine that if you woke up on your 60th birthday and figured out that you dragged yourself to work for the past 40 years of your life? Wouldn’t that be pathetic? But yet, many of us drag ourselves us to work every day. We sit in front of our monitors and tap on our keyboards and gyrate our mice, emotionally disconnected from what our hands and minds do because our hearts are some place else. We speak about “work-life balance” without even giving a thought to the utter absurdity of the term.
Some of us are least bothered. We never had a passion in life and we never cared. And some of us did have a passion, an yearning to do something that we truly loved. And we now live in denial, telling ourselves that it is fate and that we need to stick to what destiny has planned for us. We tell ourselves that our parents have a standing in society and that it needs to be preserved. The pressure of our peers and the mockery our relatives, didn’t we have enough?
My story today revolves around two people, whose names I do not wish to reveal. One of them is about to finish his first year MBBS at CMC, while the other just joined as a fresher for the same program this year. They are 23. Yes, they are as old as me. And I just completed two years in the corporate world! Do you know how difficult is to find yourself in the company of people who are disconnected from you emotionally by age? Do you know how difficult it is to get ordered around or even ragged when you are an adult? Well, at least it is not as hard as finding out that you should have done something else in your life when you are old and have a grandchild on your lap!
So, what did you want to be? A physicist? An economist? An architect? A doctor? A dentist? A writer? – the deep earning of a soul back then but bad memories that bring a sigh now. Why should it be that way? Why can’t we change it?
All we have is one life and I think it does not make sense to live it for others unless you are absolutely sure that you want to do it that way. Run to your first love.
During lunch, a friend told me about another who had a deep passion to become an architect but took up electronics and then went on take up a position in the software services industry. She still retains her passion for architecture but quite unfortunately post graduate courses in architecture require a undergraduate degree in architecture or at least in civil engineering. I wrote this post when I came back from lunch.
