Musings on a Gray Wednesday Morning

It's been raining incessantly for the last 15 hours. I can see muddy pools forming through the white haze outside my window. It's kind of bleak, but I think it's pretty. I love how wet  and green the leaves look, I love the sound of the rain, and I love the smell of the wet earth. It makes me want to curl up with a book and an ample supply of coffee and cookies. It is also the only thing in a long time that woke up the dormant writer inside me. (Even I started to think she was dead!) If anyone still reads my pushed-into-oblivion blog, I have some musings I'd like to share.

With all the hustle and bustle of the upcoming placements, I find myself freshly confused about what I want to do in life. What I want most right now, is to have a clear idea about what I would like to spend the rest of my life doing. I want to travel, and read, and have lots of money and pretty dresses, but what do I do for a living? As of now, I want to do everything and nothing. (I know- That's very precise and helpful when it comes to choosing my future.) The moment I know, or realize, or decide, my life will be less of the intangible, obscure mess it is right now.

In "The Hungry Tide", Amitava Ghosh describes this moment of truth very beautifully. When Piya realizes she want to spend her life studying the dolphins, she says 

"It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth."

I loved the phrase, "an alibi for a life". It's so very apt, but I've never heard it put like that. How I wish I had something to make me feel like that!

On an entirely unrelated note, I somehow landed on an article titled, "Can we really have it all?" The author mentions that when the modern-day-working-woman wants to have it all, we assume she wants to have a successful career, a happy family, a great husband and two wonderful kids. The point she raised was interesting. If we call ourselves modern, why do we assume that this is what will make someone happy? She might want to be a stay-at-home-mom, or she might never want to get married at all. Who are we to decide what the ultimate aim of someone's life should be? And rightly so! 

 

It reminded me of a line in another book, "Eleven Minutes". The protagonist, who happened to be a prostitute writes in her diary:

 

"I walk about streets and look at all the people and I wonder if they chose their lives? Or were they like me, ‘chosen’ by fate?  The house wife who dreamed of becoming a model, the banker who wanted to be a musician, the dentist who felt he should write a book and devote himself to literature, the girl who would have loved to be a TV star, but who found herself instead, working at the checkout in a supermarket. 

I am not the only one, even though my fate may put me outside the law and outside society. In the search for happiness, however we are all equal... "

 

The last line changed my way of thinking for the better. I used to judge people, wonder why they did certain things they did. I would wonder why someone would want to get married at 21 and be done with their lives. 

But this line made me realize that they did it probably because they thought it'd make them happy. I could probably still not understand it very well, but I could at least acknowledge that we wanted different things from life, and what would make me happy would probably not  work for her. And thus, I stopped judging. 

Now, I'd better get myself some coffee and chocolate chip cookies.