Not by choice
By: Saheb Motiani
Tags: Life Lessons, Short Story, Choices

He gets up in the morning, takes a deep breath, opens his eyes and allows the light from the sun to enter his body. With a little smile on his face, he looks at himself in the mirror and starts to brush his teeth. His phone rings, he wonders who is calling at this early hour, and he fetches his phone to pick up the call. Seeing the time on his phone, he realizes that he is late for the office cab and the driver is calling for the same. He tries to hurry up, takes a shower but can’t make it in time to the cab.

Reaching office an hour late gives him a feeling of guilt, he quickly settles on his desk without glancing at people around him. He decides to skip the breakfast as he had already wasted his initial work hours of the day and didn’t want to be in bad books of his manager with his appraisal coming around. Quickly preparing himself a cup of coffee he begins his day.

Checking his mail, he comes to know that the application was down the entire weekend because of something he did last week. Team members were not happy with his irresponsible behavior and must have expressed their concerns to his manager. He quickly started to work on getting the application up again. While doing so, his manager comes to his desk and asks him to pull back his work and put it back once he has verified they are working. He knew his manager was not happy with him.

He worked for few hours straight without any distractions, realizing later that he is late for lunch and all his friends have already had their meal. All he got to eat was salad and soup, and no one to talk to. He quickly finished it up and got back to his desk with a cup of ice cream in his hand.

Forgotten about his phone in his busy day, he checks it out to find a lot of missed calls from his girlfriend. He calls her back, but she rejects the call. Then he reads her message, which said that her entrance exam didn’t go well, she was crying and wanted to talk to him. Not being there for her added to his sadness of the day. His day was turning out to be a really bad one now.

After attending a couple of team meetings, he left the office without giving a fuck about what his manager thought. On his way back, he has to listen to the conversations his cab mates are making as he forgets his earphones in the office. Some are about how much money their friends in other companies are making, some are about which new phone to buy, etc. This continues till he reaches his stop and gets down the cab.

He had enough for the day, he didn’t want anything more to go wrong, he wanted to quickly go to sleep with a hope of a better tomorrow. Hunger got to him when he got thoughts about sleeping. He was early and was afraid he will have to eat alone again. Having spent most of his day in front of a computer, with bad things happening one after another, he had no expectations of anything.

He likes his own company and happily eats alone, but today he wanted someone to share his meal, but he had no choice but to be lonely.

While he was walking to his home, he got a call from his roommate, he picked it up quickly, and his roommate started with a slang asking him where the fuck he is and when he is coming back home as he is hungry and waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears, he opened the door and found his roommate waiting for him.

And his bad day turned into a memory which he will cherish for a long time.

………ends!

A choice is a privilege. I have advocated being alone, eating alone, loving your own company, and many other things. But today I want to emphasize the point that it looks good or easy when you have a choice and you are willing to take that route.

Be it loneliness, be it struggle or be it a failure.

It is easy to opt for them when you have a choice, but way too difficult to deal with them when you don’t have a choice.

Our generation is known to be in a mesh of choices and the only problem is to make the right choice. But not everyone has that luxury. Be happy if you are confused in making a career decision as you have options to choose from and stop crying over your dilemmas.

I always used to think life should be a zigzag graph of ups and down and everyone should struggle to realize the true importance of being successful. It made me feel that I knew that struggle will come and I will work my way over it. But that is not a real struggle I would say. Real struggle comes when you don’t want it, still you have to do it as you don’t have a choice.

Real failure isn’t when you are expecting yourself to fail and are even ready to fail and try again, it gets real when you are not at all expecting to fail, you are expecting clear victory and you hit the rock bottom.