The balloon looked upon her from the sky,
“Let’s play again,” said the colorful dot.
“Ah! The child within me is still alive,” was all she could reply.
Swaying along the mood swing, growing-up is just another dry thought.
It all started slowly then all at once. The above lines sum up a bygone phase that we miss constantly with the passage of time i.e. childhood. Somewhere between school timetables and office routines, we grew up. As I am writing this, I am taking a walk down the memory lane to map my way so far into the corporate world.
It has been a year to my professional life and still, I haven’t been able to make peace with the fact that I am leaving my innocence as I enter my cubicle with each passing day. The cubicle is nowhere close to the cozy classrooms of school and college that used to fill my soul with a child-like excitement whenever I set my foot inside.
Teachers have been replaced by bosses. Board room presentations occupy the laptop’s heart instead of those colorful charts that we prepared with our young minds to decorate our classrooms. Recess isn’t the same as the lunch breaks that we get in our offices. Time flies and how!
And, I know that I am not alone who feels this way. Most of us in our early twenties are trying to grasp everything that our corporate lives have begun to throw at us. We are pushing ourselves to attain maximum laurels at the work desk.
But, it isn’t akin to achieving the first position in the class as in the big, bad world of professionalism; we are expected to be out-shining everyone, including ourselves. Competition is not healthy but fierce in this world. If you don’t perform, your colleague will and there is a chance that it might demotivate you, especially if you are a fresh ‘kid’ on the job.
While a professional life gives us a chance to explore a new side to ourselves, it reinforces the cliché that change is the only constant and it is up to us as to how well we embrace it without killing the child within all of us.
All I want is a dialogue,
Just like old times, when I didn’t have a blog.
Laughing with a pal was always a part of my itinerary,
Which has now become a part of a distant memory.
Back in the day, we were proud to be a part of a jovial gang that studied, played, pulled pranks and ate together. As we usher ourselves into the job mob, we see that ‘friends forever’ part ways and the ones we never expected to stick around, side with us in a way that nobody else could. A lot of times, we end up dedicating ourselves to solitude post working hours. Moon becomes our companion in the good, the bad and the ugly. It listens and spreads its light into our lives, just like a soulmate would.
Also, first jobs are not necessarily our dream jobs. We strive to work hard but are seldom happy. Maybe, we should let go and not take ourselves seriously just like college days when we did not fear for our lives when we didn’t submit an assignment on the due date. Even if we got punished, we made sure that our friends were with us in that too. Let’s revive those days by bidding a bye to stress.
Money matters start taking a center-stage in our lives at this age but it is not everything, after all. Let’s take that unplanned trip that we secretly desired to. Let’s eat good food, do what we love and invest in our happiness, even if it costs some money. Money comes and goes but life happens every moment. So, we should let it, shouldn’t we?
Sometimes, our corporate lives are unfair to us. But, it is life and it’s anything but fair. Remember when you were scolded by your teacher for talking in the class but it was actually your friend who was talking and you had to bear the brunt for it? Our superiors in offices might not understand our worth all the time and if it is undermining our esteem as a human being, we should walk away from the very workplace, immediately.
We plan a lot of things in advance before we reach out the twenties, but let me tell you something -“Never expect to reach your destination even before you begin it. Keep your expectations short but live a little longer every day.”
And, in your professional life; every single day, you will realize how much you still have to learn, like it happens with each class or semester. The only difference is that the learning process doesn’t fade with your job switch. It is a continuing process. Deriving our own life lessons is the key to developing a thick skin to carry on with this phase.
A creative adult is a child who never grew up. So, make life work for you and not the other way round. It’s your life, make it large.
image: source