HEAD OR HEART? – ON LIFE
As we parade through our good old lives, we get to a point where everything suddenly gets real. Up until then, we are told to follow your passions and fight for your dreams and clichés like that. What nobody remembers to tell us is that a) it is all well and good to say, but it is not going to pay the bills, at least not right away. It can work out for sure. But the ratio of people following their passions and being successful at it, and the people who get real, will point at the obvious; and b) that in most probability, the people saying ‘go ahead, follow your dreams’, have let go of theirs long ago themselves.
Call it an early mid-life crisis or the struggles of starting out with a business of your own, or then sitting in a big office alone with a deafening silence around me; this has been a thought on my mind for a while now: why does the majority of the human race get to a point of having to choose between their passion and profession? Why can’t the two be the same?
The truth is, we have all grown so used to a certain way of life that we have forgotten, we weren’t born with an itinerary that said “next stop on the tour – “Get a job!” or “Get married” or “Have a kid!” or anything at all. There isn’t one fixed way of leading life really. It could be absolutely, and I repeat for the sake of it seeping in, absolutely anything you want it to be. (Hoping the bold and italics helped, if the repetition didn’t).
There is some sort of creativity in almost every single human being. The problem is that we nip it in the bud without even giving it a chance in most cases. It is time to get real it seems, as we push ourselves further away from our existential reality, conforming to the societal norms laid out before us only because that is how some people chose to live before this.
The human life is about the human spirit, the dreams, the desires, the moments that make life worth living, and it truly is as romantic as it sounds. I don’t know of many people who, at the age of three and four want to grow up and become HR managers or Bookkeeper, but I do know of many who wanted to become scientists, astronauts, writers, actors, dancers, footballers, cricketers, who have now grown up to become…mostly engineers.
In fact, it is an inside joke, most comedians in India start with ‘I used to be an engineer’. And no offense to engineers (especially considering I come from a family of them), I only picked this as an example because…well there are so many of them in India, but more importantly, because that reaches out to my point of conformity. If you have chosen a field because you wanted to, then my respect to you, but if you chose it because someone else wanted you to, then it is time for you to ask yourself a few questions, starting with
- Does this make you happy at this point of time?
- What would you be doing if not this?
- At the end of your life, will you look back at all the time you put in here fondly or with regret?
Because believe it or not, if you are going to die a slow, natural death, then you are going to have a lot, and I mean, a lot of time to look back and ponder, but not enough time to turn things around and start again.
So once you have the answers, perhaps go back to my point few paragraphs ago, we weren’t born with an itinerary in hand. Life can still be absolutely anything you want it to be if we only just give a little more credit to the beating of our hearts. They know what they want before the head can begin analyzing yet…
I’d love to know your thoughts about the same! Do share them in the comments below, and I promise to reply to each one of them!
