It was a usual Sunday evening with nothing very special about it. As every last weekend of a month, there was a family get-together brunch, just that this time it was in our house. After everyone had left, I asked dad why there was such a hue and cry in the backyard after food and why Uncle Gary seemed to be shouting. He told me that Uncle Gary wasn’t shouting, he was merely overjoyed at the fact that he had just recently confirmed a huge deal for his own company.
Uncle was in some kind of textile business. He would be going out on some business trip every other week. I never enjoyed moving around from one place to another. I mean, what was the point of jumping around and making a living out of it if you couldn’t spend time with your family or even be at home half of the time. This is not how I imagined myself to be. So after my tenth grade when my dad had asked me what I wanted to be, I told him straight in the face that I surely didn’t want to be a businessman or a sportsperson or a pilot or take up any other profession that wouldn’t allow me to stay and relax at home after a busy day at work. He tried to persuade me about the advantages of roaming around the world but I simply despised it. After a long chat with him I finally decided to become a lawyer. A profession in which you interacted with a variety of people , which my father wanted me to do, I didn’t mind that, but what struck me was that it was one of the few jobs that had about 90% chances of staying at home. Sometimes you could even work from home, and I liked to fight for what I believed in. So that’s what I decided to pursue.
Now years after that conversation with dad, and dodging all those assignments and my-dad’s-so-called ‘opportunities’ to go abroad, today I find myself with a promotion letter describing my new set of duties. Of all the great benefits that it came with, the one thing that stood out to me was that now I was supposed to take frequent tours around the globe.
Now, sitting in this cramped seat on this small aircraft, I wonder what I could have done to actually avoid the situation. I realised then, that there are some things in life that you simply cannot change. No matter how much you try, you simply can’t run from your own fate. For me it is the fact that I didn’t wish to leave home. It struck me then, that if I had accepted this from the beginning and made the best of that, instead of running away from it, perhaps I wouldn’t be so disheartened as I am now. Out of the blue, a phrase that I had read long long back but had never understood clearly, stared at me in plain sight and made its meaning crystal clear to me.
‘All roads lead to Rome’
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