Identifying Myself

Who am I? One of those perennial questions that have plagued humankind since time immemorial; spawning countless tomes, chants, religions, credos, cults, grams and hashtags as our species strives to come to grips with this quintessential dilemma. It is the best kind of question really; brief and elegant, but with layers upon layers of complexity lurking beneath the surface, like the gigantic mass of an iceberg hidden beneath the frothy waves. 

A question that has been increasingly playing in my mind over the past few months amidst a heady milieu of personal and professional exigencies. Maybe becoming a parent has made me more conscious of where life is heading and where I actually want it to head. Or maybe it is just the cacophony of the world around us these days, where we seem to be lurching from one economic / geopolitical / ecological crisis to another in a never ending conga line of alarm and absurdity. Or could be that I am just getting old and need to gripe about something. Whatever be the reason, I have some food for thought to digest.

So who am I? I am a husband, a father, a son, a friend, and I feel I do okay enough in these roles. I also have a career where I am doing all right, and enough likes and interests to keep me fairly engaged and occupied. I have a burning, unrequited ambition which is flaring up more and more these days and hopefully taking me towards some game-changing inflexion point. I have things to look forward to, some things I regret and others I don't care enough about. My life is good, but could be better; I have done well to get to where I am, but there is so much more to do, things that are still missing. So how do I define myself then? Am I your regular average Joe who is one mid-life crisis away from skydiving out of a plane and getting a tattoo? Or more a vainglorious chump who still harbours fantastical notions of making it big? Do I clamp down hard on restlessness and go with the flow, or 'move fast and break things'? I obviously don't have any answers, else I wouldn't be agonizing in print here.

One thing I do like about this state of mind is that I am still thinking hard about what I want from life, that I have not accepted status quo and gotten lulled into some comfortable rhythm of existence. I have dreams yet to be realized which I have not given up on and they continue to be the wind beneath my sails. True, this restless spirit has to be channeled in the right way to reach the right conclusion, but its existence itself is comforting. It does mean, though, that I can't identify myself as a cheery, sunny bloke with nary a care in the world. And that does suck sometimes, especially when you come across others who are in this very same, magical state of mind. I look at them, I look at my to-do list for the day and it takes all I can muster to not tear my hair out. So that is me I guess, a roiling melange underneath relatively calm exterior which I hope some day will coalesce into a meaningful whole. 

Till then, I have a post-it with the number '42' on my office computer screen. For those uninitiated with The  Hitchhiker's Guide, this is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The problem is, nobody knows what the Question is. Summarizes the absurdity of life quite succinctly in my opinion, and a good reminder to not take things too seriously. Tomorrow will be a new day, a new frame of mind, and hopefully one step further towards the next stage in life. 

P.S. Watch Pathaan on the big screen. Can't recommend it enough :)