Never too late to discover life and your true calling

SPICE OF LIFE: Life is finding time to sit with yourself, not using work as a form of escapism and following your heart

As a child, I was fed with many idioms because mother would come up with a unique one for every occasion. One such adage that I found intriguing, though couldn’t decipher it completely until recently, was: Life begins at 40. I would wonder how and why?

My newfound love for life became stronger in the past year and a half that we have been playing peekaboo with this seemingly perpetual Covid pandemic. I tried my hand at golfing, practised yoga and took nature walks. (Representational photo)

However, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, amid the restrictions and constraints, I discovered its true ethos and consequently the meaning of life. As I readied to ring in my much-awaited 40th birthday this July, I realised that life is certainly not about running to work every day at 9am, waiting to be home by 5pm, being wrapped up in the monotony of the routine or living on terms dictated by society.

It is the opposite! There is so much more to life which we do not even attempt to unveil. Life is finding time to sit with yourself, not using work as a form of escapism and following your heart.

My newfound love for life became stronger in the past year and a half that we have been playing peekaboo with this seemingly perpetual pandemic. The activities that remained on my bucket list for years became a reality. For instance, I tried my hand at golfing, painted Vincent van Gogh’s Field with Irises, practised yoga, took nature walks, wrote poetry, visited the farm regularly, enrolled for a French course, spent time with my family and, most importantly, experienced little pleasures like having tea with my husband.

I realised life is too short to be engulfed in the mundane, so I revamped it by quitting my noble profession of teaching computer science in a college to pursue my passion of being a personality development trainer. Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama’s words guide me: The purpose of our lives is to be happy.

My journey hitherto had been a rollercoaster ride as I got married at 22, became a mother at 23 and started working full time at 25 along with continuing my studies. There was no looking back, slowing down or pausing for more than a decade and a half which was spent in proving myself to the world.

Nevertheless, as I stepped into my forties, I suddenly started to feel more confident and less bothered about how people perceive me. Thankfully, I welcomingly embrace my flaws and have finally begun to take charge of my life. The sudden awakening in me has made me realise that I have to press the reset button to refill the pending gaps in accordance with Albert Einstein’s statement, If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.

Even though my longstanding plans to celebrate my milestone 40th in Goa with my gang of girlfriends went down the drain because of travel restrictions, my plan to live life free and fully will continue forever. I seek solace in the couplet, “Kabhi kisi ko mukammal jahan nahi milta, kahin zameen toh kahin asma nahi milta.” nazam81@gmail.com

The writer is a Hoshiarpur-based personality development trainer