Uncertainties of life

“The Uncertainties of life, wherein loss, wherein gain, the piccadillos of fate, Trust them to be the biggest deception, which in time reveal its primary colors, by when which Life will have taken its course.”

It is always the road not taken which people worry about, I believe, but come to think of it, whichever way you move in life, unless you are too complacent, life surely places before you choices at every moment and life seems to be just about making the correct choice.

When I was a child, many things were certain. Love and affection was certain from parents. School was just like a staircase. Progressing from class to class was as simple a codified certainty as crossing one stair leads to another till you reach again a flat place wherein you need to make choices again. Till you reach the end of the staircase, you had only one way to climb – up.  Many things were certain, the way relatives and friends treated you, the way your family friends treated you was certain. As kids, we had the right to be trusted and be considered naive and innocent and hence all our actions, adventures, pranks were considered immature or childish things and didn’t in any way affect one’s impressions of us. Yep, in Games, we sure learn to accept failure and defeat, but then they are the only two choices we know are certain in a game, but in life, there will be many compromises too.

Once you cross your high school and get into college, you taste the first tinge of freedom and realize that you can take your own decisions in some things and you explore that freedom for the fun of it. College life is just about having fun. Generation gaps slowly reduce the levels of communication between parents and children. Parents themselves get busy having just crossed their 40s, planning for the future. Children get busy in their new found freedom and search for friends. The bloom of teenage and adolescence teach us the first experience in uncertainty.  We learn through those adventures that what we take for granted always isn’t. the same anymore.  We cannot expect perfection nor can we expect things to remain the same forever. Setbacks and walking in and out of relationships both strengthen and weaken a person. A person with strong self esteem from childhood comes out of it learning a lot of things and comes to accept that change is an inevitable aspect of life and also comes to slowly accept uncertainty. But even in college there are rules which govern our studies, our personal and social life. We surely can afford to break some rules, but still we are protected and insulated in a cocoon where we become sometimes the proverbial frogs in the well.

University life teaches further, about life, about the world we live in and the multidimensional intermingling of cultures from various places. The degree of freedom is much higher here. The gap between you and your parents undergoes a sinusoidal curve. You reach out to them in times of despair and happiness, but rarely in between. We keep talking regularly, but do not communicate to our parents our aspirations, our feelings, or our dreams. We explore all the wonders of freedom, any times, even transgressing rules set by parents and society out of curiosity. First Love, First Medal, First Best Friend- everything has its charm and mystique. All of us treasure our University life a lot because at that age, we view life from our perspectives and everything looks new and worth exploring. You desire to learn a lot in all avenues. These impressions carry on with us for a long time and in some cases, I find that we just seem not to even get rid of them.

Emerging out of university are all segments of citizens, strong esteemed people who have experienced everything in college life and have become stronger and more resolute, self esteemed people who learnt to build their esteem in college and come out better than what they were, low esteemed people who lost their self esteem further down because of lack of support from both domestic and university life. These three segments of people come out into the world and represent all of us. I myself am among one of them and all those who are reading this fall easily into one of these three. The years of university life also make us understand that we aren’t the only stakeholders in our future. There are many of them deciding our future. Rare and lucky are those whose path in career is decided by them and them alone. The Majority fall into the groove of taking up family responsibility and rushing to get the first pay check through the nearest avenue. Likes and dislikes do not matter here, responsibility comes first, then only comes me. Some lose faith in relations, while some attain more faith in them.

Coming out into a job shocks us, because the rules of the game aren’t the same here. You cannot be complacent and still expect to climb up since here it’s a flat land. You need to chart your way through. Many bends you take may turn out to be dead ends. You turn back and try to get onto the mainstream, but you find that you need to build the momentum again. Especially being in the software field where there is no permanency anywhere produces both stronger and weaker people. People keep changing projects, teams, and workplaces at the wink of an eye. Initially it looks great – you enjoy the movement and like moving out to new places. But once you have family, it becomes difficult to move from place to place.  Rahul, one of my friends was given a days notice by his client and he had to pack off with tiny Hrishab and his wife in 2 days to base branch. I couldn’t even give him a sendoff because he was too busy in settling things. Being far away though has its advantages. You understand your partner more because he/she is the only person who is there for you who completes your home and your life. You also tend to understand your parents better because age tempers the mind and softens the heart. You now understand that all their injunctions in earlier years were more out of concern than imposing restrictions. You muse at your earlier rebellions and move on. Maturity sets in and you come to accept uncertainty.

We software engineers adapt ourselves to uncertainty more than others because we operate in Internet time which is seven times faster than the normal time. We find that life is a continuous learning experience and that if learning stops, you become absolute. The job is not certain, neither are relationships, and we learn happiness is not permanent. It is always a struggle to better the position we are currently in because the ideal position isn’t possible here because we ourselves do not know what it is. You become both a warrior and a field player. You become stronger, more assertive because sharks loom round in the corporate world and you need to keep defending yourself always. Life isn’t so easy, still we bring out the best of smiles for everyone. We learn life much faster than other professions because the avenues for us to learn are more than others. After the initial years, we become either of these, go to the path of self destruction in pursuit of more and more challenges, in effect losing distance with the family and  becoming like a machine or go to the path of joy by relaxing, being content and being able to be a good partner, a good son/daughter and a good person. The choice is again left to us, but this time unlike in college, we take the decision with a much more mature mind.