And there is no working the clock backwards. But while making this choice do we get to have a good look at what our future is going to be, or in other words “what we are going to be in the future”? I guess not.
When it comes to making the choice of a career, most of us are jumpy. We tend to nab choices that have gathered around us, in our socio-sphere, by means of other such choices people made at different points of time in the past. We are, so very intensely, caught up in the subjective glare of hackneyed ideations and personifications that are residual of our social circumstance. I do not want to sound skeptical but I think we are too confounded between our ears in relation to a subject that needs the widest possible intro and retrospection. No harm done as long as we are able to make a living, or rather still a very decent living. But the point of the matter is that while these are matters of individual choice, we are, all the same, bound by duty towards our society. We cannot afford to be self-sufficing, idiosyncratic body masses, can we?
The outcome of our hurried decisions pertaining to our careers eventually affects the standards of our society. Why else, I am forced to ask, are there not any inventive engineers, practitioners of holistic medicine, trendsetting architects, contemporary poets, path breaking bankers or for that matter passionate politicians (politicians as understood in the literary meaning of the word) around us. Well, I don’t mean that we are not good at what we do; but we do not excel at what we do at a quantifiable level. Exceptions apart.
What is that we need to do badly and utterly fail to do, while choosing a career? Well, we happen to crumple ourselves trying to make something good happen while reaching out to make this choice. Juggling between citedly “excellent opportunities” to learn how to get through that CET and the figurative relapse and refuge citadel (a lesser sought bachelor’s degree in this case) we tend to lose out on the “meat”. Yes, we fail to give ourselves the time to recuperate from the choking conditions that standard education systems bestow on us. All we need is a breather, I would say. While intending to, or surrendering to the intention of making a career choice we need to take some good time off. Relax for say one year, or at least a few months and contemplatively look around. Compared to an average lifespan of 65-70 years what is a year? After all, we would be dealing with options and not constraints when we are done. So, take care.
(Author, a trained journalist is a public relations professional with a major Kashmir company)
