Six years ago, if somebody told me I would be travelling by bicycle for several years, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Oscar Wilde said, “if you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.”
Once I too considered my career as a punishment, a sentence I had passed to myself and worked for 37 years. It is not to say that a PhD in computer science and a software development career in Germany were not the dreams that came true. But were those dreams mine?
The society conditions us from such an early age that we rarely get to discover who we truly are. It’s not our inner voice but the modern reward system guiding us to what we should become. And one day, we do become something in the name of our destiny. But deep within, we know something is not right—the feeling that comes when the heart is not in the right place.
I had such a feeling for a long time too. It is never easy to leave a career you spent a lifetime to establish and that took a lot of sacrifices from your family. “When the crops were ready to reap, you walked away!” my elder brother always says to me.
But, once the realization of self insignificance in the infinite universe arises, along with the feeling of mortality and our minuteness on the scale of the eternity of time, everything, however crucial, becomes meaningless. The only way to get out of this dark situation is by feeling alive.
Our careers don’t have to confine us, for ours is a wondrous spirit. When something doesn’t excite us and there is no adventure and no thrill in what we do, we die inside.
The society will always impose its view on us. It will create walls around us so we cannot see what lies beyond. It doesn’t want free souls lest the old world will collapse.
But it is for us to climb those walls, discover our passion, and endlessly chase horizons. There are infinite dreams and infinite tracks along those endless horizons, but all paths will converge to one, the one which makes our heart beat and stars float in the ocean sky. There is a reason for our being. We only have to keep going.
We will never be too lost as long as we can see the horizon!
