necessity is the mother of reinvention??

After my musings on Nothing is Better than Something, I was bombarded with queries on what should be the plan of action if a discerning soul were to indeed realise the futility of their journey already undertaken well past its time, and they want to return to a path that they always wanted to pursue ever since they could recollect.

Or simply put… the journey undertaken for so many years has failed to deliver the destination.. is no more exciting.. has not yielded what it should & seemingly may not yield desired results ahead too.. or just is not making sense anymore…Many of my dear friends wanted to know whether it is possible to ever consider a UTurn midway…

Tough question actually! A vast majority wouldn’t even dare consider such a perceived blunder. It’s too late to turn back. To rewind the clock. You are way too invested into something already, that the fear of nothing coming out of it cannot be entertained… the hope of the possibilities from the known, someday yielding some semblance of comforting output, is far preferable to the fear of the unknown and untrodden gamble, at this stage of life. The adrenalin tanks have dried up. Risk taking abilities are buried deep in the debris of the catalogs of perils that the society has enumerated in its evolutionary wisdom.

Imagine yourself setting out on a road trip to a much awaited, much planned, passionate journey, to your life’s most favourite destination… to some exotic location in some mesmerising hilly terrain. You prepare yourself carefully, get your vehicle serviced and fuelled up and set out. Miles and miles of travel through some dense forest.. after some turn that you took.. on either some expert advise or thanks to the scintillating voice of the gmap… and now you are cruising along the dense forest with tall trees lining the road on both sides .. so dense that visibility is only a few meters in. Network has disappeared. Fuel is running out. Dusk is nearing. Destination seems to be nowhere in sight. All your gut feeling and survival instincts are screaming that you took the wrong turn and are on a path that ain’t goin to the place of your desire.

Wouldn’t you take a u-turn? Wouldn’t it make sense to return back to that crossroad and start over right again? Would you still be adventurous enough to explore the possibilities of perhaps hitting the right destination through the seemingly wrong path. Or maybe look forward to a possible more fantastic destination ahead.. one that you didn’t even conceive.. would you really attach importance to your instincts? Or would you in all your wisdom rectify your mistake, turn back to the point from where you will got your dream destination. What would you do?

And what if some stray native, enroute, did confirm that the path was indeed wrong. Would that influence your decision?

Nerve wracking dilemma … or an easy question with a nobrainer solution?

Well this imaginary situation was just a simple attempt at exploring the possibilities of making a u-turn from an off course vacation path. What if your wrong road is the path of your life? What after an arduous trek up the uphill of life.. after covering a lot of distance… bearing the brickbats and treacherous ups and downs .. having spent a good part of your youth you discover that you are about to reach a wrong peak… or worse.. you are on the wrong path of life with no peak in sight… what should one do at this juncture.

I don’t know what you would do. Or what anybody should do. I would return back and attempt the right journey again. I have always returned back unabashedly and unhesitatingly from any erroneous judgment or choice. It has been difficult undoubtedly. It is nerve-racking and calls for yet another instalment of timeframe from the fast depleting balance of the current account of your timebank… yet I wouldn’t be caught dead on a trail which didn’t lead to my destination.. or worse a journey to nowhere. I will die attempting what I want to do rather than live in pursuit of what I don’t want to do.. That may delay my journey or the time taken to reach my destination.. or maybe I may not reach it at all.. but I will have the comfort of being on a road of my choice … inching towards a goalpost that I have chosen…

And to live the life that you want for yourself is a basic necessity of any existence. It’s not a luxury… and the rules of the game always has shown that necessity is the mother of reinvention. The last six months have disastrously shown us that reinventing sometimes isn’t a choice. All the grandiose plans of humanity went for a toss with some miserable uncouth moron of a bat transmitting it’s curse over to the most spectacular of the planet’s creation, who with such monumental advancement hasn’t been able to remotely reach a solution yet.

All tenets of humanity have been reinvented. All practices and customs and traditions have been forcefully reinvented. All beliefs and dogmas have failed to stop the reinvention of their dogheaded existence. Early February this year if someone had said that people sent to hospitals with flu like symptoms would never be seen again … and disposed off without any semblance of time tested rituals, one would have earned some money by passing on such an imbecile to a mental asylum. But today it’s cloaked as a new norm. All the rituals have reinvented themselves on the diktats of the necessity of times.

Why, even the established organisational processes and methodologies and ways of existence of many businesses that were sworn by as the only one kind of possibility.. bequeathed by decades of unrelenting experiences are now being questioned by their own vociferous fanatic preachers.

When necessity hits you unexpectedly, you got to reinvent choicelessly… and that’s not written in any scriptures.. it’s the basic tenet of existence. Mankind has usually always progressed on that very single motive… necessity. The first guy who created/discovered fire or a wheel or a motor car or a plane or a cure or a theorem or a rocket or a vaccine or a philosophy or a religion or a machine … Or anything that helped the civilisation progress a notch better than what was bequeathed… he/she was never influenced by the factor of doing good for the society as a sole objective… it was his/her raw selfish desire to make their own existence better than what was given to them. That as a collateral might have inched the humankind a level ahead.. but only as a collateral to the primary objective of the necessity of its creator.

Any underdog success story that is any day hair-raisingly inspiring… be it the likes of Oprah, Branson, Rowling, Musk, Mandela, Ambani, Dell, JackMa, Schultz, VijayShekar Sharma, Bansals, NarayanaMurthy, Bachchan, Lincoln, Jobs.. and the plethora of them are nothing but products of dire necessity… the difference being that, for the mundane, the basic necessities of life hold them ransom over their choices and for these rare success icons, the burning desire for extraordinary achievements become the necessity. And a random analysis of their journey will lead to the fact that they failed or missed their paths many a times before stubbornly backtracking towards their chosen purpose.

So there is no shame or fear in any U-Turns. It’s just the question of your own appetite for your goals and your hunger for your ambitions and your raging obsession for your aspirations. That’s the clincher.
Necessity is the mother of reinvention. If it isn’t. .. it ought to be.

Every event of our life is a page in a cosmic chapter.. including the entire journey of a soul on this earth… we are a cumulative book of many such chapters across many lifetimes… across many planets, perhaps… we are travellers and travelling across any terrain is our only dharma .. let’s do it to our best abilities.. in the journey you will get great cotravellers and and great situations… we may also get some extremely bad ones.. laugh & be merry with the good ones.. bear with the bad ones and keep travelling. Let’s amass the best possible experiences in these journeys that may dictate better scripting of future chapters.

And hey… if you are on the wrong track of life.. one that doesn’t excite you.. one that doesn’t lead you to your chosen destination… then don’t hesitate..

Take a U-Turn.
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May the force be with your necessities and buddy… keep reinventing.
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