Perhaps

My life is like a treadmill- increasing the pace still does not seem to get me anywhere. That was me describing my life to a friend. And the morbidity of that statement scares me. I am just at the start of my life, how can I believe with such conviction that I am in a rut. Yet I do. And there comes the next thought process – why am I in a rut and what do I believe will help to get out of it. The answers are complex and convoluted.

Often we have expectations from ourselves and from what we believe our life should pan out to look like. It’s our social conditioning which we have to thank for this. We grow up compartmentalizing life into stages and phases and we have definite benchmarks about what the outcome of each phase is expected to be. The thing about the years of education is that we constantly have that deliverable- we move on to the next class, we have that test we clear. It’s all tangible. However, once you enter the real world, any semblance of tangibility starts to fade. The lines between what you expect, what people around you expect start to blur and therefore a sense of moving but not getting anywhere?

So we decide to set our own milestones – salary, position, location, and marriage- the list is endless. But the problem is that these milestones do not have a definite trajectory. There is no book to read and there is no test to be passed and hence there is no way of assessing additive success. Either you have it or you don’t. And if you don’t, well, life appears like a treadmill.

I used to think that just having direction is half the job done. I am not so sure any more. Sometimes, you know where you need to go, you probably know how to get there, problem is that we mostly have a blurred sense of the goal and hence getting there provides us with a multitude of options as well.

And it was in the middle of this entire thought process that I recalled a very odd conversation with my boss who in an effort to appease gave me a spiel on how he works for happiness and nothing else. I remember laughing at that time. But today that statement seems unduly profound. It makes sense. Work for happiness. We live in an effort to make people around us and hence ourselves happy, work is a significant part of our lives, why can we not seek happiness there as well.

That is when I realized that a lot of people do seek happiness at work. It all boils down to priorities and these priorities are so deeply entrenched that they cannot be altered despite any amount of social or educational conditioning. And perhaps when individual’s priorities are significantly different from those of people around, the sense of what the goal is gets clouded by what it should be. Just as what one does is often dominated by norms than desires. Perhaps that leads to a sense of lack of movement. Or perhaps the lack of movement is because of skewed expectations - because one does not get on a treadmill to get anywhere, but to achieve a specific goal in those fifteen minutes. Perhaps the answer lies not in getting off the treadmill but recognizing it for what it is – a way to achieve a temporary goal. Because life is not a treadmill really and it will not give you a goal attained signal- you just have to know that with the small goals, the larger ones may be achieved. It all boils down to faith. Perhaps.

Hum of the day: Learning to walk was not easy. You could do it as a 1 year old. Today, you may not take that risk.