I enjoy
playing FPS games like Call Of Duty. I play it almost every night before going
to bed. It’s a team game where you squad up and play. Regular players form
their squads and play with the same set of people everyday. I am in a similar
situation. I have a squad of about 3-4 people with whom I play COD
everyday(almost). The thing is that you talk to each other during the game and over a period of time familiarity breeds and you get to know a little bit about your squad members. In
one game, during the slightly lull part of the game, one of my squad members
was chiding another one about his childish actions and he referenced to me
saying that this guy should learn from me who has completed "half of his life".
The context doesn’t matter, but I quickly jumped in saying “Hang on bro. That’s
not true.” To which he replied “You must be 35+ years old and nowadays most
people are not making it past 70. So you have already lived half your life.”
The game moved on but that statement stuck with me.
I couldn’t
sleep that night. It’s an ironic thing to be made aware of your mortality while
playing a game where you win by killing the greatest number of players. I had
been under the impression that I was just entering the mature phase of life.
Lots of things left to be done. Normally, whenever you are faced with the
ephemeral nature of your life, a checklist comes into your mind. The items on
the list vary from person to person but for most of the people, its about those
Indian old school middle class values of ‘having made it’ in life. Owning a
house, car, financial safeguards, that ever-fantasized foreign trip etc. The
reason for me not being able to sleep that night was that I hadn’t ticked off
most of the items on the checklist. Being a Maths guy, it automatically comes
to mind that if X number of items are ticked off in half the time, then in full
time 2X number of items will be ticked off and for me that 2X was much lower
than the number of items in the list I would be reasonably happy with to be ticked
off.
Then came
the downward spiral and the eternal question of what am I doing in life. I
struggled with it throughout the night. In the morning, I found clarity and it
came from a very unlikely source, my son. He is at the age when he has started
to eat food on his own and since these are early days, he takes a bit of time,
which is not entirely ideal when he starts running late for school. To push him
along, I went the competition route. I told him “Lets see who finishes eating
one bread first.” After I had wolfed down my bread piece, I turned to him and
said “See beta, I won the race. Come on, Catch up with me.” He coolly looked at
me and put his tiny hand on by back and said “Well done papa. You finish your
food fast and I will finish mine slowly.” And with that he went back to
methodically taking small bites.
Our life is
not really a comp
etition to see who ends up with more trophies. Each person has
to figure out their own journey. Plan and put into place habits and processes
which will lead to long term goal fulfillments and if some of those goals don’t
get fulfilled, so be it. Life goes on and worrying about the past doesn’t help
enjoy the present. I have been taking steps towards checking off those
checklist items for a few years now and hopefully
somewhere down the line, they come to fruition. But one thing is for certain, I
am not losing my sleep over it.
