A New Girl in the City- Going with the flow, or trying to stand apart!

Coming from a small town, life swirls you right from the bottom of your feet on coming to a metro city. 

Delhi it is for me. 

And even though I have been here countless times in the past, moving here cannot be compared to any of those previous leisure trips. Be it finding a not so great abode for myself, or the daily commuting; be it the struggle for the everyday meals, or the terminal exhaustion to just go to bed without much ado, all of it seems like a trap to an endless maze. I do explore some new paths and add those chapters to my life everyday, but by the end of a week I am back to the perpetually same tracks. Still fighting the urge to ask myself the same question, if this really was my purpose in life? 

There is this thing with dreams, that they make it really difficult to accept the reality! And more so,  when the reality never at all occurred to you in those dreams.

I mean, I have got tired of explaining this to people I come across, that I am in a specialty that I chose for myself. (Nuclear Medicine, a branch which is not so popular among my fellow medicos, let alone the commoners. Please Google for further details on my role as a Doctor here.) And I'm happy to have chosen it over the many other branches which the crowd follows uncritically. I did my research, and weighed all its pros and cons before I decided to get into it. I needed to be in such a branch to be able to live my life my way. Just that the whole idea of what exactly 'my way' is, what I have dreamt of through these years, keeps changing as we grow. And to be honest, I am with the clan here, hating to grow up! But still making a choice and accepting the present, which perhaps is not straight out of my dreamland, but it is clearly the right plan now.

How I miss those times when things were as simple as attending lectures, studying for the next exams, and enjoying with friends and family. According to me, that is the realm in which one has the guts to have ambitions, and dreams, and to believe. To Believe that you are capable of achieving it all, and any kind of restrain in your path seems insignificant then. This is how I had imagined and planned things for myself all these years, because I had always been brought up in this coddled dome of optimism and love made by my family. Believing I can do the extraordinary, and somehow achieving those little milestones in the long run, made me an exemplar for them. But now, the reality of this cosmic city makes me feel no more than ordinary! Having seen life at its crudest, I now have the wishes of any other common man, that is to have a job, a degree, a family, some peace, and eventually happiness. Nothing more really matters! I'm grateful to have met the most of it at this point in my life.  And I'm fervently looking forward to reach out for the remainders.

But the ugly truth is that the ideal world that we tend to seek, the one with a perfect balance amongst work and family, success and failure, joy and sorrow, can never exist in reality. Because there is always going to be some part in excess of the other. And this would cause colossal shifts in our psyche, altering the definition of our dreams and desires, eventually scarring our lives to impact all our future goals. 

(I recently read this somewhere and got really inspired, quoting Mrs. Georget- Scars mean survival, it means that we showed up for the fight rather than running away from it.) 

It makes me realize how it is all a part of growing up. That we are supposed to develop into these indifferent beings, rather than what we used to think of ourselves in our carefree tender days. It certainly makes our emotions stronger but sadly our psyche weaker. We learn to value relations more than the merits of our career and we tend to prioritize discordantly to our own foregone whims. Atleast that is how it has occurred to me, and it seems perfectly legit now. The ways of life are not predicable.  And so should we be taught to go about life. That come what may, I shall adhere to these few agendas of living my life this new way- 

Seeking not only academic merits, but also joys of little happenings;  being prepared for worse, while trying not to be doomed in pessimism;  being hopeful of more, yet cherishing the little that I may have; 
 and finally, wishing not for the exceptional, but for the amicable.