Tim Robbins writes to Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption that hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and good things never die. My life over the past few years has been quite happy; and hence I have never needed to take recourse to this dialogue. If there is a best of things there must, then, be a worst of things. On the verge of leaving for Oxford, I feel several emotions - the most potent one being one of fear. It is said that those who have nothing, also have nothing to fear. To turn the argument around, those who have most have most to fear; and hence I fear immensely. There are two things that I fear the most right now - one is the loss of my happiness (drawn mostly from the relations I have nurtured or formed over the last two years) and the second is that I may not have made the most economically wise decision in taking the path that I have.
I turn to the Buddha to explain my first fear. The Buddha said that attachment - to people, to things - is a potential cause of sadness. I have grown attached to every aspect of my life over the past two years. I grew attached to my lifestyle, to many of my colleagues, to my college friends; I can almost say that I was addicted to my life. For once, my life was turned upside down and I drew joy not from within myself, but by interacting with and enjoying the world around me. Any kind of separation is painful, and this separation will be painful too; and I fear that pain. I have experienced emotional pain, in its most raw form, and trust me, it is not something I want to see anywhere near me. I have hope that the last two years have fundamentally changed me, and that it has given me strength to cope better with a 'hostile' situation. Time will tell.
The second source of fear is doubt regarding turning down a promising near-horizon career path and choosing to do this M. Phil. in Economics. The problem I am facing in dealing with it is that my memory of even two months back is too fuzzy; I am unable to compare how I feel today with how I felt two years back. I am comparing, instead, to how I felt a month back - and this does not work because the last two months have been an unsustainable high. I read some maths yesterday, and I reacted with joy and trepidation. Joy akin to that of re-discovering an old friend, and fear that I may not be able to cope up. Memories of hours spent struggling with the subject came back. Again, the answer is to let the learning of the last two years guide me. I chose this path because (1) I wanted to see how it is to come back (2) I felt I still had much to learn in Economics. I need to stop fearing, and start doing. That's probably the only way this will go away.
