Frozen Wishes

Today, I co-facilitated a training session with someone. Since the training was about objectives and instructional design, everyone was asked to state one goal they were pursuing in a finite amount of time. Someone wanted to take a vacation, someone else wanted to lose weight, someone wanted to save, someone wanted to go scuba diving, and on and on it went. When I asked this question to myself, I drew a blank. I have no intermediate goal(s). This I’ve realised in most of my conversations with N, too. She has a particular career trajectory she’s pursuing whereas I am just putting in everything I have in a day. I don’t think about the next day.

So, it’s safe to say that I have no imminent goals, or something that I am pursuing. I get up, do whatever I have to with everything I’ve got, and I sleep. And it happens again. This suspension of expectation and even plain wishfulness has settled inside me. I have no quarrels with God, too. Whatever I don’t have, I don’t have. What I do, I am grateful. But to be honest, I wonder if this is going to help. Or am I going to wake up some day and realise I should have been more aggressive about what I wanted. I can’t say. That small broken part in me that used to hope is struggling to be heard and says, “You won’t regret it.” But it’s so feeble I don’t think the universe can hear me.

Come to think of it, the universe hasn’t heard anything I have been saying for a long time now. My suspension of expectations comes mostly from disappointment – a deep, silent, resolute disappointment in what has been doled out to me in the last few years. There’s a famous sher my mom tends to say occasionally.

Khuda se maang jo maangna hai, Akbar
Yehi wo dar hai jaha aabru nahi jaati.

(Ask God for whatever you desire, Akbar
This is the only place where you won’t lose your self-respect.)

I wish it were true. I really do.