Return to Index
Is your life planned ?
Have you set up goals you want t achieve ? short, medium and long term ?
Or are you going with the flow ?
Are you living your life or life other people want you to live ?
Is your life running on "cruise control", going along without any real input
from you ?
Are your job, wife, child "accidents" that happened to you or did you seek them
out ?
How much of your life is your own and how much belongs to others ?
Do YOU feel ALIVE ?
We all think we have made reasonable goals - study, career, marriage, kids,
retirement. We plan to take regular holidays, make a list of countries we want
to visit in our lifetimes, buy a "nice" house, "nice" car and maybe have a
socially acceptable hobby for retirement. Is this it ? Is this ALL
we want out of life ?
We study what we, or rather our parents and teachers, think we are good at. Most people have no idea how the education world is different to the work world and hence have a rude awakening when they "come to the job market". We plan to apply for jobs in certain industries and for specific job roles in specific locations and yet after a few rejection notes, take the first job that comes through.
Now a days most people start searching for a "life partner" after we have "established our career" as a wage slave. We try to find someone that will match an impossible list of requirements only to find that we are running out of time and often hitch up with the first "mutually compatible" person. Some of us lucky to "fall in love" and abandon the list of requirements we made. Children come when they come. Even after mariage, people often wait, heaven knows for what, before having the nuisance of "little nippers" running around our ankles. Suddenly, time catches up and we scramble to have kids before our biological clock tells us it's "too late". Some of use one kid, find nappies and sleepless nights stressful, and decide to wait a few years before repeating the process. How many children should "we" have ? 2 or 3 ? Should they be our or should we adopt from poorer part of the world ? We hope to send our children to "good" schools and hope they become competent professionals - hopefully rich too. We look for a house in a nice area and then revise our aspiration to meet our bank balance. House plans change when we realise "our ideal house" is not close to the kids school and so we scramble to look for the new "ideal house" near the "ideal school". Just when we feel good about all these choices, kids go to college and university in another part of the country, abandoning us near a busy school. Another house change ?
There is no such thing as a "job for life" any more. How many job changes have
you planned for ? Have you created a career progression plan within that ? Oh
yes - marriage is no longer "till death do us apart". Have you planned for
that ? How many times will you marry ? Some people just love going
to divorce courts, again and again ! Have you planned for illness - yours
or your partners or your children's ? If something major comes to derail your
plan, how will you cope ? Have you planned for that ? How about political or
economical stability of your country ? Any contingency plans for these ? We
haven't even reached retirement yet ! What plans for the "twilight years" ?
Alone, together, divorced, ill, "in good health", in which location ?
Have you seriously thought of ALL this and more ?
Most of us, including me, haven't planned life in any great level of detail.
Broad brush strokes of "what I want my life to be" is too high level to plan
for a meaningful "life". For most of us, life just happens to us. Our myopic
plans are too short term to have any real feel of an over all plan. Often,
there is no plan other than to survive into old age - whatever that means !
So, do YOU have a plan ?
Do YOU have a goal you want to achieve before death comes to claim you.
Do YOU have a legacy you want to leave behind ?
What mark will YOU leave behind you in this world to say - I waz here ! Leaving
behind 2.4 children doesn't count - they are your descendants and in most cases
they were not properly planned anyway.
Plan something.
Be a part of something.
Just make sure that something is great.
Make sure that something is actually worthy of YOU.
As Shri Krushna advises Arjun - "Nimmit mantra bhava Savyasachin".
© Bhagwat [email protected]