When Doubts Arise

Many dar­ing and coura­geous youth who have stepped out of the beat­en track face this issue. Recent­ly there was this boy who had a research career and also a cor­po­rate job. His heart want­ed him to take up research in spite of the pay but his par­ents and well wish­ers want­ed him to take up a cor­po­rate job. So many doubts crop up in our mind. So how will he decide? Even if we stay in the beat­en track, we stay there because of our fears and inse­cu­ri­ties. Dai­ly morn­ing we wake up and hare going to office but some­how we man­age to go. This is one way to approach it — a very dif­fi­cult and mis­ery bound way. The bet­ter way is to see the larg­er rea­son why we are doing things. This gives us a sense of pur­pose and direc­tion. But when doubts assail us, how do we han­dle them?We don’t know which is right for us. GRE or CAT? Cor­po­rate job or high­er stud­ies? If you ask hun­dred peo­ple, they would give hun­dred dif­fer­ent opin­ions. When we get inputs, our man­as or mind swings from here to there and back here. Not just 2‑dimensional but some­times 3‑dimensional and hyper-dimen­sion­al spin­ning hap­pens. It is very com­plex. We must under­stand that it is not con­fu­sion but a process of gain­ing expo­sure where you get more data about some­thing. When you are decid­ing on a bike, some­one gives you a sug­ges­tion based on mileage, some­one else advis­es based on main­te­nance. There is no con­fu­sion here. You are only gath­er­ing inputs from sev­er­al peo­ple and gain­ing a holis­tic per­spec­tive. You become rich with data. You do not need to decide yet. Only when the deci­sion point comes, you need to decide. Till then you can eval­u­ate these var­i­ous choic­es. But many peo­ple con­vert this process of gath­er­ing data into a com­plex process of decid­ing each moment and this looks tedious. You do not need to get con­fused at each moment. After mak­ing a deci­sion if a doubt aris­es, what do you do? Before deci­sion mak­ing it is a process of data gath­er­ing, after deci­sion mak­ing you just need to stick on to it for a while. When you are young, if you have the sup­port of peo­ple around you, you can exper­i­ment. You can exper­i­ment for a cou­ple of years and then decide whether to stay on the path or switch. This is a very valid process. But now peo­ple think very uni­di­men­sion­al­ly. They do not look at rich­ness of expe­ri­ence. They look at mon­ey. If that is top pri­or­i­ty for you, then this sort of a explo­ration is not a good idea. But! incase mon­ey is not the biggest focus for you then explor­ing is not harm­ful at all. In fact, you will see that after 30 you become real­ly rich in expe­ri­ence, after 40 peo­ple actu­al­ly con­sult you seek­ing your wis­dom that you have gained through that rich­ness of explo­ration because your data points are var­ied, wide and extreme­ly accom­moda­tive of mul­ti­ple are­nas. So if you explore one path, the path of explo­ration is clear, if there are doubts you hold it bay until that peri­od of explo­ration is com­plete. To pro­ceed on a path, you need to earn the sup­port of peo­ple around you. As I said, peo­ple are every­thing in your life. If peo­ple do not sup­port you, then its very tough. Towards that there is no harm in keep­ing at bay your incli­na­tions for some­time and allow­ing it sur­face lat­er on. Or some­times com­pro­mis­ing by tak­ing anoth­er tra­jec­to­ry. It is not wrong! When you see the larg­er scheme of things, you will see that there are var­i­ous paths to the same des­ti­na­tion and hence it is okay! That is inner space. It accom­mo­dates vari­eties of paths. That is very impor­tant to invest in. That is where med­i­ta­tion and all these inner sci­ences come in. It gives you the inner space to accom­mo­date all the expe­ri­ences that hap­pen to you in a pos­i­tive frame of mind. Oth­er­wise you can become extreme­ly bit­ter over this process and start this blame game “my par­ents do not allow me to do it.” It will nev­er end. The cir­cum­stances gov­ern what you go through. That is nev­er a great idea. Your inner expe­ri­ence should not just be con­se­quence of cir­cum­stances around you, it should be more than that. It should be accord­ing to what you see, the deep­er rea­son that you see and apply in your life. That is a good way to lead life.