Moving on ...

What is it that makes moving on to the next step so difficult? It was all so easy in school . You finish one grade and move on to the next . Getting through is not very difficult for most and the process is synchronized so that no one is left behind. Until you pass out of school you are taken care of . Only then that meritocracy kicks in . You go where your abilities ,proclivity , ambition and various other factors take you . Taking decisions becomes important for an individual at each of these junctures . Moving from school after completing 10th to another institution... choosing a discipline for pre university , UG course selection ... they are all important for most people in the retrospective. By the time you realize that the strings which your parents (siblings) were holding should have been in your hands all along , you are stuck in a high paying job with absolutely no or little correlation to what you are interested in. Which brings up the point, what are you really interested in? I can think of a handful of things which I love to do and still cannot single out one which would be an option to pursue full time. I can't play quake full time , I would then probably become a Dependant on my brother or even worse on my retired parents . Anything would be better than depend , and so once most of us enter a job , we stay stuck for 1 year, 2 years and slowly it just slips our minds how once upon a time , there was a dream , a dream to achieve something . The will to go through the extra hour to learn that skill , nurture that special talent which would one day make all eyes revere you and how smug you could be.

Somewhere in the middle of this phase are stuck many people not unlike me. I for one have had several passions in my short life of 24 years. I used to love to sketch with the pencil , pen , sketch pen , in the sand , in dirt , on dirty cars and even in the air! The feeling of elation when I can draw a balanced, proportionate figure of a guy , or even better a woman still never fails to show up. The only difference is that the frequency of this event has gone down drastically. You call it the dying of the human spirit , the drying up of creative juices , procrastination , aging , in fact you can attribute it to umpteen reasons . The fact remains that I am becoming an addict to mediocrity . I find me telling myself every time I am challenged by a particular task , why not delay it a little longer . It can wait for some more time and then I can be done with it forever. The attitude towards anything which does not interest me is so allergic to say the least and disinterested at the max on the outside . Two years of working in software can do to me what 14 years of school and PU could not do . I seriously think that what I am running on now is the momentum of a time when I attained a peak , some time in 10th standard when I could listen to my biology teacher Mrs. Simon at a stretch for 45 minutes and then sit down and write down all that she had said. I had the confidence that I had it in me to do well at any task related to studies .

The difference between then and now when there is so much more freedom to choose what I can do , is with choices . I chose to follow a path , a well trodden path . A path which would guarantee me an easy life so that I would not have to go through the trudge my father went through . I know that its a good option , something which thousands of people go through every year... probably suppressing the desire to become a poet or a cricket player or an artist. It is after all basic education now . So what if you were great in school. That does nt count all that much. You then have to excel at 12th , college and at the end of it all , you know that at the bottom of your heart , all you really want to do is just sketch faces on the class notebook. I have been living in this state of perpetual inner desires reaching out for satisfaction from different sources . Don't even get me started about other unsatisfied desires !

The time to make some important choices has come again and this time I have taken probably one of my first major decisions which could be quite life altering and all that . Its the decision to leave my first job , which is almost like the continuation of my life from college . The thing that made it difficult to do it all these days was I had trouble getting myself to focus on preparation for interviews . The will to do it was not there and after some introspection and learning from past attempts , I latched on to the simple formula for minimum required success (LOL)... do the right things , not necessarily the tough things , get all the material for preparation ready and just read (and probably program) sincerely . And so with a job in hand and an imminent move from my first place of work... I stand in the midst of a photograph , where I am moving from one stage to another . I do not know where this decision will take me . I do not know if life as I know it will be better or worse . Will it bring back old memories as I go back to my hometown , or will it finally be the course which will eventually lead me to that woman who I long to hold in my arms and smother with kisses , will it make me a better son to my parents , to whom I my duty as a son still remains largely unfulfilled , will I at the end of it all make my self happy ...
I wish I could learn to move on ... in life .