A younger cousin asked me this week.

After school, graduation, a job, marriage, a child… Have you scratched the bottom of the well? I’m curious because I haven’t thought about much after marriage and a child. You’re already past that so what are you looking forward to now?
Hope that all makes sense.

Of course it does make sense. It’s hardly been a decade since I have crossed the threshold of teenage and this was pretty much all I could think of too. Back in the days, I visited Sufi meditation cults, joined discussion circles of idealogues planning on reviving the caliphate and attended resident workshops of a LUMS’ professor working for Muslim Renaissance in order to find my own, unique calling. I now miss those days for my cynic, firm and passionate religiosity but more so, for the freedom I had to pick a path and then change it. The freedom we all lose a little with every passing second by virtue of the very nature of time itself. The future looked daunting to me but also equally enthralling. I could be anyone and be anywhere. The advertisment of Turkish Airlines on the Readers Digest back cover always had me daydreaming of the future:

Too many places to be
Too many faces to see

In spite of those days tinged with the delicious flavor of infinite freedom, I secretly yearned to settle down. I saw my university professors hard at work through their lab windows at nights and ached for a job to consume me and pay me well for it. Yes, it has been an eventful decade in that I managed to check off quite a number of items on the success-checklist (if there exists such a thing at all). Having scored a decent job and started a family of my own, it may seem like I have ‘scratched the bottom of the well’. Yours is an interesting question asking me what’s next. To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to it myself.

I think as you move on in life, even if you get lucky and everything turns out to be amazing for you as it did for me, unfortunately you don’t get to stay there as you’re still moving on after all. The happiest moments soon become a thing of the past as the euphoria of an achievement gives way to a new normal, raising the bar. You realize happiness is a mirage and find yourself wondering if there’s a deeper purpose to life than chasing it. Plus, as time goes by, happiness too is harder to come by.

As you climb up the career ladder, your job starts to encroach more on your family time and you basically find yourself juggling between that and family and any of your personal interests (for me, these are fitness and literature). Weekends become your only refuge from this tedium and exhaustion when you can actually give time to the latter two. Yes, sometimes, during a morning run while running on a splendid dirt trail into the rising sun, as the sky erupts into red flames raging in blue ocean, life does seem beautiful and intriguing. Even lovable, perhaps. You start to live from one such moment to the next.

I once looked forward to ‘settling down’ but the routine is gradually wearing me down. The cost of my static, well paying job is starting to outweigh its charm. I find myself dreaming once again of traveling the world; of a stylishly dressed Turkish air hostess wearing a red beret and head scarf on an old Reader’s Digest back cover with a poetic tagline reminding me what I had forgotten for long – there were too many places to be and too many faces to see.

I also think I have discovered a lot of things I’m good at but I’m yet to discover the one where I’d produce excellence. The very excellence that my university professors produced working like a bee in their labs. Their faces gleamed with a strange expression I could never put a finger on as they locked their labs each night and ventured glowing into the darkness. I think it’s the eternal search for the unknown which keeps us relevant; gleaming. The voyage is important and the destination, perhaps, just secondary. I’ve been waiting too long at the destination for miracles to happen. Now I need to plunge. From all kinds of comfort. Into chaos. To find my very own voyage and more so, the courage to embark on it. And for that, I believe, I’m ready.