My Next Life

Again, a Sunday and a Sunday post. 

After taking on this travelling life, Sundays are travel days for me. Sundays often mean a late morning flight out of Gatwick, with the goal to reach somewhere by Monday morning. Often, my mind is closed on Sunday morning, in anticipation of the sleepless night that would follow. And, indeed, there are other Sundays to play the same chore in reverse, to get into Gatwick early morning and then spending rest of the day catching up on all the sleep missed during the two week sojourns and indeed, the red-eye!

This is one rare Sunday without any of that, and that makes me so protective of it. This is my time to think and read, I would like to believe, though the usual life soon catches on - it usually reaches its full crescendo around mid-Morning, usually with the clarion call of Milk (or something else, most inevitably) running out. So, I stop my indulgent reverie and return to Planet Earth, usually manifested as a Shop Aisle, at around 10am! But, the moments before that, rare, private, indulgent, are still time to dream, spaces without anxiety, pure moments of being me. This post is one that I write with such a mood.

At a time like this, I enjoy the sense of authorship, not of this blog, but life itself. Nothing that I do was written, as the expression goes, and almost everything was willed. I guard against being too self-indulgent or arrogant (so even when I see myself to be the author of my script, the acknowledgements come obviously) but it is still the ability to will my life that causes the desire to shape my future. So, at this somewhat empty moment, when I feel the lightness of being, I imagine the future in my own terms. 

In more than one sense, such will comes from failure. I have tried and failed many times, though I see the trying part of it more prominently than failing part of it. Right now, my life is somewhat a mess, at least if I succumb to bourgeois measures to money and mortgage to measure my life. As I was relating to a friend, all my adolescent dreams of being a shipwreck like Robinson Crusoe (and, the other role model, of Bohemian artist living in Paris) have indeed come to be true. But, then, failing and being a failure are two different things, and I, in this moment of playing creator, treat those failures as deliberate brush-strokes, even if dark, on the canvass I am painting. And, these hopes and dreams, which is perhaps the point of this very post, are the lighter edges of such darkness, which may either transition, as the canvass progresses, into bright lights or be subsumed into darker shades. But I remain the creator after all, at least in these brief Sunday moments.

So, returning to practical talk, I see this very moment in life as transitional. You can be dismissive about this and say I always do, every moment of my life, as I treat life as a collection of moments, and living as a journey (I remain a traveller, therefore), lived with no fixed purpose but only with Nietzsche's maxim that it must be worth repeating an endless number of time. Given that, each moment of life is best seen as a transition, laden with endless number of possibilities, rather than a predestined transition from one state to another. In fact, the idea that I am the one to will my life is intrinsic to both life being a transition and it being worth living, because, then, instead of being prescribed in advance, it is a continual progress of imagining and scripting on the go.

With that mood, then, content to be discontent, in the permanent state of non-permanence, with the only purpose of possibility, I will my next life, to be as different from what it is now. My next life, as I see it, will be of living where I am (so I postpone my plans to return to Asia at least for a few years) and pursuing a more creative life than I live now. This means taking up my writing more seriously - have I not done the selfsame apprenticeship for a decade now on this blog - and I am onto my first project right now. [My work is on the work of creation, as I reported intermittently here, and to study the lives of great creators. I have just finished reading the life of Einstein, and about to return to Freud's, and a general study of Enlightenment.] Indeed, all this means what I do for a day job, and my intent is to move to creative work rather than operational management work, as my current occupation could be described as. 

So, a more strategic, creative role based in the UK that I am looking out for right now. This could indeed happen within my current engagement, either in the education company I work for, or the redefined education business that I set up and which may now get taken over. And, indeed, this could happen outside of either of those, something that I would seek out, perhaps after I have delivered on my current commitments, by October of this year. But this is one of those moments of defining and expressing intent, to affect a pivot in my life. This is another of those moments, uncertain, probably the start of another failure, but, surely, one of excitement, possibility and of will.











Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lord Macaulay's Speech on Indian Education: The Hoax & Some Truths

Abdicating to Taliban

India versus Bharat

When Does Business Gift Become A Bribe: A Marketing Policy Perspective

The Curious Case of Helen Goddard

The Morality of Profit

‘A World Without The Jews’: Nazi Ideology, German Imagination and The Holocaust[1]

The Road to Macaulay: Warren Hastings and Education in India

A Conversation About Kolkata in the 21st Century

The Road of Macaulay: The Development of Indian Education under British Rule

Creative Commons License

AddThis