I was a part of the SRCC Youth Conference a week ago. And apart from all the great speakers & their talks – there is this one fact that still tingles along. And rather than an ecstatic feeling, this one worries me loads ! It was one of those sessions where the speaker asked the audience about how many of the ones present there were confused & didn’t know what they wanted in life or what they wanted to do as a career or life-goal ? Surprisingly 80% of the audience said a YES to that ! Imagine ! And this was the audience which consisted of the brightest minds of the country’s youth – this was the audience which consisted of the students who had made it to the University of Delhi with marks such as 98% or so. Though 70% of the crowd was of the first year, a batch which had already been admitted amongst much confusion in the University – I don’t blame them much. They still have time to figure out things. They still have their college life to give them the answers to such questions. Not everybody can nail their goal early on in life. But the worry here is that this majority carries on, even after post graduation, even in the workforce, clueless.

So is it because of our education system ? Or is it because of the society at large ? Or are we to blame ourselves for our indecisiveness, for our lack of purpose ?

Tough questions, given the fact that we can have a lot of the blame game here. Blame the education system, because it laid such amount of emphasis on the marks that we forgot what the real motive of education was ? Which certainly was not to make us rote-memorization machines, taking in NCERT book loads of information and just write the same thing in verbatim in the answer sheets ! Blame our parents, because they somehow made us adhere to such an educational system, forced us, in a way, to comply to the societal standards of being educated ? Or do we blame the society at large for pressurising us with such amounts of competition that we forgot talking to ourselves ?! Or are we to blame ourselves ?

Maybe yes. We ourselves forgot to listen to our inner voice. The basics of understanding ourselves. We have spent so much time looking at other people around, knowing about their lives, emulating the ‘idols’ & thinking of ourselves at their place that we have forgotten to look at ourselves, to hearing what that silent voice inside us speaks of. We have, sadly, forgotten to see the uniqueness that we bring into the world. The amazing extraordinary being that each one of is. We forgot looking for that gift in life, that differentiator. We instead became ‘one of those’. Because well, that mattered.

It is not surprising that majority of us don’t know what we want in life. How many of us have had the time to pull ourselves away from all this ‘beating the competition’, ‘connecting with each other’, ‘keeping up with the news’ ? Few. At least that’s what the numbers speak. Amazing how the concept of Facebook has demeaned the habit of diary writing, because as I heard one day, we are living our lives in hashtags, in snippets. Taking life as it comes.

And to cut this sorrow down, it’s pretty easy to find the solution. Spend an hour or two with yourself. Once a week maybe. A full day a month. A vacation with yourself sometime. Talk to yourself. Talk about your dreams. Talk about why you want to achieve them. Talk about HOW YOU PLAN TO DO so. Everything will seem sorted, trust me. My diary’s pages speak as testimonials to this fact. A diary which has recorded my dreams, my plans & fortunately the story after I did achieve a part of those goals, often in a way much better than I had foreseen, but planning did help (& gratitude helps even more). :)

The Pursuit of Purpose definitely seems like a precursor to The Pursuit of Happiness. (This movie is on my to-watch list, more so because of the recommendations, so the name kind of keeps playing in the mind ! :P )

Well, this brings me to the end of the post, given it’s time to call it a day, even if it be this late. But a quote caught my eye as I type this post & in between catch an update or so. The ADHD me ! :P

Will leave you with that.

“Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.