A few years ago, I was at IISc Bangalore to give a talk. And I was raving about the beautiful, idyllic campus to my host, a retired civil servant who was teaching an undergraduate class.
When my host told me that he had previously worked as the registrar at IISc, I virtually squealed in delight — what a wonderful experience would it have been!
But instead, my host told me that his time at IISc was a complete horror. He had so much conflict with the then-director, that the stress levels landed him in a hospital with a heart attack.
Who would imagine that in a charming place like IISc, you would get a stress-induced heart attack?
We all crave a beautiful future — only if we could live in this city, only if we could have a house like this, only if we could get this job… our list of desires is endless.
But the only certainty in life is that things will not turn out the way you expect. You could be really happy in the crummiest of circumstances. And the other way around.
Our biggest challenge is not making money, or getting some job — as hard as those things are.
The biggest challenge in life is to not defer happiness to better times — to soak in the joy before us right now.
And we all know this, yet we can’t stop chasing. That is the irony of life.
– Rajan