Destination and the Journey - The Dichotomy of Success.

I have been consumed by the idea of setting up goals and working hard to achieve them during my early life. I remember how I somehow managed to pass with distinction marks in my High-school board exams. The next day of results being declared the top ten scorers from my school were featured on the third page of the newspaper, and the topper of the school was given a special space with a big photograph and one paragraph about his hard work. I remember how it made a part of me ache.

The next day I set a goal of getting that space for my Intermediate board exams. For next two years I got completely immersed in my Books. I gave up hanging out with friends, packed my keyboard and put it in the store-room and stopped socializing with friends/family. The journey was full of hard-work and compromises but it never bothered me. I literally became the disciple who would just see the eye of the fish. Eventually that day came when I was in the newspapers and stories of my hard work were inspiring the kids of my society.

And isn’t this how it was supposed to be? You decide a goal, choose the necessary path to get there, and just deal with the journey that impends. And it was working for me. I made it to a good college, build an attractive resume and landed a high-paying job. And then one day it wasn’t working for me anymore. I was away from family and friends, posted in a strange land, could make no time to play my guitar and keyboard, and I was giving ten hours a day to a central govt job doing something that I absolutely didn’t like. The goal of landing a govt job and attaining financial security started to lose its meaning. And this is when I realized I couldn’t take this journey any more.

The idea of setting up goals and pursuing them could just be the right way, logically speaking. But logic is overrated, and at the end of the day, the world works on emotion as humans, instinctively, are emotional beings. And when you’re in pursuit of a goal, you will never stay true and honest to the process and will do most things just so that you can get a little closer to your goal. You will weigh what material value people are adding to your life before connecting or establishing/sustaining relationships with them, and gradually people who actually care for you will keep drifting apart. Your advice to younger generation, even to your own children will be driven by a measure of how high a platform would it give to your pride. Your projection on people will become a priority for you over your true-self, and being nice will take over being true. And someday soon enough, all this will start working against you because the journey would be spent with the sole intention of getting a little closer to your goals.

And mind you, we never really stay at a destination. As soon as one goal is achieved, we immediately start our next pursuit. We’re always in a journey, and therefore the journey has to be beautiful. Things can be done just for the sake of it, not because they will lead you to something bigger and better. Love because you find someone lovable, make friends because you can’t have enough of their company, connect with people not their positions, care because you can, help because you have a big heart, learn music because it communicates with your soul, read because it enhances your power of imagination, talk to people because it lets the toxins out, and lastly, life itself is a journey, live because it is one hell of an experience, a one-time experience.