“Come on. Get up. You will get late for school.” How many times as a schoolboy have we heard our mom screaming this early in the morning? Sometimes we replied “No mom. Do not feel like going today.” Mom would then hit back with “Just get up. You do not miss school. Finish schooling nicely and you are set for life. Then you can do whatever you feel like.” And guess what? Its been so many years, 28 for me and nothing seems to be set. And except for very select few, it is pretty much the same story for most of us. You grind and grind to “set” and that simply eludes us.
It never ends.
You spend your school life listening to “Finish schooling nicely and you are done.” And then you find yourself slogging for various entrance exams and you hear “Just clear this exam and you are set.” Then all through college its the same circle all over again. And the story continues through job, higher studies and for everything under the sun.
Just reading it again and again is so wrenching and in everyday life we have actually lived it day in and day out.
And then every body talks about happy and stress free living. This is when the personal hassles have not been accounted for. For a very few, it is sure a cakewalk but for the rest “average” or even a little “above average” it is like walking in a live mine field.
Life comes a full circle ever4-5 years and the getting set business looms its head up time and again to keep us haunted.
Much has to do with the situation prevailing in India. How many of us actually follow our passion. Why do we fool ourselves and the company people by telling them absolutely ludicrous answers like “I am passionate about analytics or banking or sales or programming.” For some of us this might be true but why the rest of us answer in the same fashion. For most of us our passion lies in sports or dance or writing or painting and many other things. And this is again for some of us who are actually lucky to know what we are passionate about.
These are what, are more satisfying even if you sometimes fail at them rather than getting a gold medal in something which really is not your calling. It would be a great achievement alright but still not even as half satisfying. And hell what? Very rarely one will be able to excel at something on which we do not have our heart set on.
Paradox is, we cannot follow our passion because of family backgrounds and uncertainty in earning livelihood from it and we are forced to pursue things which really are not our first choice. And then everyone everywhere wants people who are excellent at everything, think out of the box, are creative and what not. What should we be? Superman, batman, spiderman and God himself compacted into one physical bodily form!
The point of all this blabber is that among all these things, we stop living. We treat life as a task to do and then pass on. Sometimes it just hits me, “What is this life so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.”
And reality check is, that no matter what you do and do not do, these things keep cropping up again and again throughout life. So we need to shelve them more often and go out and play that perfect match or paint that perfect portrait or dance to divinity or cook that perfect dish and anything else which makes the heart happy.
Above your possible limits and efforts, something that has to happen will happen and over time I have come to believe increasingly that after your efforts it is that particular day that matters and it is the most potent force in that moment no matter what you do. And no matter how much you strive, the rest of the irritations just keep coming back and they just never cease.