There is both stupidity and courage in struggle and it isn’t easy to give the word a single definition. One thing, however, is certain… struggle remains constant whether we go for a big change or not.

There is both stupidity and courage in struggle and it isn’t easy to give the word a single definition. One thing, however, is certain… struggle remains constant whether we go for a big change or not.

To idolise or to vilify struggle… this is the dilemma that haunts a lot of people. There is both stupidity and courage in struggle and it isn’t easy to give the word a single definition. One thing, however, is certain… struggle remains constant whether we go for a big change or not.

Look at me. Five years back I said to myself: ‘Enough is enough. I am going to leave a conventional job and finally do what I have always wanted to do. Write.’ And I took a bold step and walked out to #StartANewLife without knowing if what I was doing would turn out right. A lot has happened in these past five years and my writing style has now begun to emerge with an identity of its own. The questions coming from friends, relatives, and even strangers has, strangely, remained consistently similar:

What do you do?
I write.
What else do you do?
Nothing else. I just write.
But your Facebook profile says you were with Samsung?
Yes, I was a sort of brand ambassador but wasn’t employed by them.
What did you do for Samsung?
I wrote about their smart devices. I still do but I don’t get paid by them.
Hmmm… so you write for publications too?
Yes, I do. For The Education Post, HuffPost India, Business Insider etc.
Aha! So that’s how you make money?
I don’t make money. I write for free.
So I see that you write. But what do you do?

This can get quite exasperating and mostly I just give a smile full of intrigue and walk away leaving a few more mysteries in the minds of my questioners. Yes, that was a rather big change that I was opting for. I was choosing a life that did not have me rushing out even before the peak rush hour had begun… a life that saw me opening the door to let Specky, my wife come in after a hard day at her college… a life that meant I did not have to bother if my salary was in or not… a life that had me reading throughout the day without meetings or urgent assignments keeping me on my toes… a life that was different, vastly different from the sort that I had got accustomed to in the past decades.

You’d think what I am saying is true. Yes, it is… but only the part where the home had replaced the office or the part that now never saw me driving into and out of lanes on my way to the office. The rest has a lot of struggle woven in.

How can struggle be woven in even when you’re at home and relaxing?

Bold steps don’t come without their fair share of struggle, you see. I had no bosses tip-toeing in or my subordinates rushing in looking for solutions… but I did have maids and press-walas and courier-boys and other workmen ambling in at the moment of their choice and each time I was the one now who had to keep the book aside or leave a sentence midway to go and see what they wanted. Staying at home isn’t free time that allows you to do whatever you want without inane noises of life coming in to jeer at your concentration. So it does take a few months to get accustomed to get up and open the door to let the maid enter and at the same time let the revolutionary new idea for another post keep churning in the subliminal layers of grey and white matter!

So yes, even with fifty-three (or was it fifty-two then?) of experience, starting a new life was just as wild as it was when I was barely twenty and had found myself standing in the centre of the drill square of the Indian Military Academy with someone in an imposing moustache asking me to ‘shape up or ship out’ or something that roughly meant that every tough act was aimed to ‘condition my body and my mind’. This conditioning phase was back again… and I can say with a confident smile that I loved every moment of it.

Changes do come with struggles. Even the opposite is true because every struggle does lead to changes. So I’m not sure if I had opted for struggles and got changes as a gift or if I deliberately chose change and was left handling struggles. What I am absolutely sure of is that changes and struggles go hand-in-hand and one cannot exist without the other.

I’m sure I agree with Housing when they admit that they “love change – good change!” Yes, “change signifies that we’re moving forward, living better, and giving ourselves the chance to be the best we can possibly be.” Every story of change and struggle comes laden with dreams and has the power to inspire others. My dreams of getting published in major publications have come true in these past few years… and this couldn’t have been possible without the step that I took. This step had the potential to even kill a weaker person, because after all, dreams come with the hard work to make them come true. Dreams come with an unending row of adjustments and re-alignments to care for. Dreams come with a howling horde of restructuring seeking your attention. And if you do all this, you have the pleasure of seeing your name linked to whatever it is that you loved but never had the time to pursue. For me, it was seeing my name linked to creative writing and yes, I know I am almost there.

There is both some amount of stupidity and some degree of courage in every form of struggle that you opt for… but then if you don’t, you will never know what life is after the change that you always imagined about. All that I can add here is that if life is fiction, then change through struggle is the real fiction.

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Arvind Passey
10 March 2015