Every place, every new experience, in the end , brings with it a whole set of new lessons in life.. Being as I am, in a philosophical mood, I am going to pen it down.
The biggest lesson :- what has to happen, will. And by corollary and an added dose of Murphy, what you want should happen but isnt meant to, WONT! People will tell you to try harder, meet this one, that one, do this do that.. but in the end, I suppose even that you will do only if you are meant to and is in no way related to the actual happening of what you want. It may very well happen that you STILL dont get what you want.
Second biggest lesson :- the govt - not one individual but as an institution- is a treasure house of surprises. When you think that you have been exposed to it for over 10 years and you know all about its crazy ways, a new place will teach some new form of bureaucrat-ese that you could never have imagined. It could be about the new depths to which something you knew already but never thought anyone could plunge to (like the backlogs everywhere or it could be a new revelation in wastefulness, how not to get things done or to not let things get done!
Third biggest lesson :- the higher you go, all that knowledge accumulated over the years only serves to bog you down.. its almost like our coach used to say for upsc - the higher your degree in a subject, it only impedes you from doing well in upsc because they are not interested in that vast universe of info that you have - they want short, succinct, to the point answers. It amazes me how, we get in writing answers like that, but grow up to work in the exactly opposite way.
Apart from this work related philosophy, there is so much thinking about life that this period has made me do.. so much that i maybe knew, but didn't truly realise.. like something as trite and common as, when we have everything we want, we think we are missing something and want more. Then when we dont have it any more, we realise how much we valued it.. i thought i had internalised this fact almost a decade ago and found that wonderful inner balance which made me value everything that I do have as opposed to what I dont.. I know did.. but I seem to have lost it along the way.. and trying to regain it is... HARD. How do you lose something like that?
Time.. and age actually makes you more uncertain about things. What you thought can NEVER happen, does. What you thought you HATE, over time you come to find that you actually don't. Even pumpkins! It's ironic because we have always been taught that wisdom lies with older people! And this thing called time.. its like camphor.. you wrap it in a piece of cloth and think you have preserved it and can best use of it when you want, but when you do open it, its hardly there.. just vapourized.. Its like what Barbara Streisand's mother says in the movie 'Mirror has Two Faces' about time. You dont feel like time has passed you by, you dont even realise it till its gone and then when you look at it.. most of that precious time would have gone in something totally not worth it. So each day is making me realise how important it is to be acutely hyper-sensitively aware of what we are doing with our lives at any given point of time. I also realise how difficult it gets, each passing day, to learn something new, specially when you have to do if after a long break. I wish I had known that because then, like cheryn, I would have tried to teach myself something new everyday.. And then the most important thing.. I look at my kids and I see how difficult it is for a human being to forgive and let go.. and life has shown me how the inability to do so has changed the course of so many many important things for us as a species.. leading me to believe that being able to do that is probably the single most important thing we should all learn in our life times..
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