I don't want to be ambitious anymore
Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition.
I have been full of ambition since childhood. If I wanted something I would get it.
I remember, when I was around 12 years old, I wanted a PowerRangers wristband - the morpher from PowerRangers Cosmic Fury - and my parents felt it was a waste of resources. Why spend on something that I would not use after a few weeks?
The desire to have it skyrocketed when I was told that I couldn't have it. So I went on a maun vrat (vow of silence). I stopped talking to everyone in the house and 2 days later I had the red rangers morpher. I played with it for two weeks, like my father had predicted, before adding it to my collection of lost toys.
Since I was a kid, I always set targets and worked my ass off to achieve them. While I was in 8th Section C, I decided that I needed to come first to get to 9th B and then first in 9th B to reach 10th A, something which was almost unheard of in my school. But 10th A had good teachers than 10th B and C so I wanted to be in 10th A. And I did it.
But I have not always succeeded. Sometimes achieving things was not in my control.
Early in my internship, I decided to spend two years of my service obligation at CMC in the Rural Unit for Health and Social Affairs (RUHSA). Nobody wanted to go there anyway, so I thought I could easily pick it and work as a primary care physician.
I planned everything I would do in those two years— research, work in the community, get a dog, make a garden, etc. Life was sorted.
But when the time came, a senior of mine decided to go to RUHSA, and I was posted in the Department of Medical Oncology for a year. I remember hating my life at that point. I wanted to practice primary care, and I ended up in one of the most specialized departments in the hospital.
My ambitious nature has given me a lot of happy memories of success. But looking back, the magic happened when I failed to get what I really wanted.
For starters, my dream college was Armed Forced Medical College. But failed ambition and a lot of magic took me to CMC; a place that changed my life; a place I owe everything to.
The next turning point in my life was the year I spent in the Department of Medical Oncology. Not only was I able to be there for my mother when she was getting treated for breast cancer but I also developed an interest in cancer care and the lack of access to it for the majority of the population. 90% of what I do now - research and community work - is because of the interests I developed in the department.
I wonder what I would have been doing now if I had gone to RUHSA or AFMC.
Similarly, Nivarana was never a goal or an ambition. I did not start off with the plan of creating a platform for public health advocacy. I only wanted to start a personal blog and the rest was purely magic.
“Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition”, writes David Whyte in his book Consolations.
“Ambition is desire frozen, the current of a vocational life immobilised and over-concretised to set, unforgiving goals. Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within, and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime’s dedication to a work.”
This chapter titled Ambition felt like a slap on the face. A gentle slap from an icy cold hand - not painful but annoying. Have I lived my entire life wrong? Have I kept away magic from happening because of the delusional safety of familiarity?
What I assumed to be my biggest strength has started to feel like the most problematic weakness now.
David Whyte writes, “but held on too long, and especially in eldership, it (ambition) comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.”
It feels like I was not fully a part of the conversation of life, listening only to hear what I wanted to hear, not breathing from the atmosphere of possibilities.
And I feel like I am making the same mistakes again; overplanning and overcommitting to achieve an ambition that is potentially blocking magic from happening; forcing myself to live in an empire of control afraid of getting my heart broken by unfamiliar possibilities.
And so I don’t want to be ambitious anymore and let some magic happen.
This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Agreed. It's a weird feeling to realize that over scheduling and running oneself ragged and burning out isn't actually giving the returns expected, and that when you let go and stop doing all that stuff, that your actual satisfaction with life doesn't stop. In a lot of cases, neither does your momentum.
It's like maybe sometimes we are rowing, zigzagging back and forth across the river bank to bank as we move downstream, just to say we've "really rode that River". And then we realized we can just sort of float instead and use the oars to avoid obstacles and we can end up somewhere rewarding rather than run aground in exhaustion.
Time to work in the garden for a while and then lie only couch and stare at the ceiling for half an hour, make dinner, ridicule a shitty doctor on YouTube, and call it a night.