I have no idea what I am doing right now, but I wish to write. I have tried writing before, but have never been consistent with it. Several times when I am not doing something that makes me feel like I’m being productive, I feel guilty. The same was the case when I first started reading.
I remember vividly that I was in grade 8 when I first read a book. It was a book that belonged to my class teacher. I was the class representative back then, so I used to collect the copies and lock the classroom’s locker every day before we left. That was where the first book that I read was; in the classroom’s locker. I had been seeing it almost every school day. But one day, I decided to read that book. I found that book so interesting that I completed it in a day. The book was “Who Moved My Cheese?”
I didn’t read the book for days after I brought it home from school. I had it in my cupboard for several weeks untouched until we got a week’s holiday (I guess it was for the Holi festival). I decided to take it with me when I was leaving for my village. My village was about 3 hours away from the town where I used to study. On the bus, I took the book out and decided to just have a look at what was in there. I didn’t realize when I was almost halfway through the book.
It was a really interesting book with only about 150 pages. I completed the book within a day. They say that reading your first book is hard, but it wasn’t, at all. What was hard, though, was taking the book and reading the first page. Once I was through the first page, I wanted to know more, I wanted to learn more. At that time, I had no idea that books were “fictional” and “non-fictional”. I thought books were simply books, and reading them was good.
After reading my first book, I wanted to read more and so I did. I read a few other books as well, most of them fictional. I read Bonecrack by Dick Francis, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks, and a few others. By then, I was very much into fiction and love and romance. But that didn’t last for long. Soon after I reached grade 10, I started feeling guilty for wasting my time.
I would feel that I wasn’t utilizing my time as properly as I could. I wasn’t doing as well at school either, I was an above-average student but academically I didn’t perform to my fullest potential. So I stopped reading fictional books, stopped watching movies, and stopped doing anything else that would make me feel that I was wasting my time. I started volunteering at Bridge to Literacy (an INGO that teaches English to children from underprivileged countries) as a web developer, and I also did fairly well in my grade 10’s board exams.
By grade 11, I had submerged myself in the productivity realm. I wouldn’t watch any movies or series unless I needed to, wouldn’t read any fictional book, wouldn’t be active on social media, my youtube feed was filled with Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Matt D’Avella, and other productivity gurus. I wanted to be as productive and good at everything as I could.
Then, I came across creators like Valspire Family and Nathaniel Drew, and I felt like “What’s the point?”. Now, I also wanted to live life the way they did, by actually living it. I wanted to just travel, meet people, document my life, and just enjoy it. Then the guilt hit and I came back to square one. I was back in the productivity realm. I started my own website, started learning how to code, started reading books, taking notes, and being a ‘good student’ at school.
“The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese.”
― Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?
I did pick up some fictional books to read, but as soon as I’d read the first page, I’d realize that this book was only a fictional book and most probably wasn’t going to help me professionally in life. So I’d stop reading those books. A few months prior to me writing this post, I was at one of my cousin brother’s place and I noticed that he had a few fictional books on his table. I didn’t have my laptop or any non-fictional books with me, so I picked up 11 Minutes by Paulo Coelho. I read a few pages, it is a beautiful book, the type that plays in your head like a movie as you read it. I didn’t want to stop reading but the guilt took over and I left the book.
Even on my website, I wanted to just write, about anything and everything I felt like. But I didn’t because of the guilt and also because then it wouldn’t be a niche educational website. So I got this domain (SurajC.com). Here I want to just write and not get carried away by the design, the SEO, the analytics, and other technical stuff by which we get carried away so easily. I want to document my life here. I want to write about the books I read, the movies I watch, the experiences I have, and I want to write about everything I feel like and whenever I feel like.
Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever had such an experience? What do you think the point of life is?
If you made it to the end, thank you so much for reading. I appreciate it. I would love it if you dropped a comment down below. It can be about anything similar or different. I would love to learn more about you and what you think. I wish you have a great rest of your day, see you again.
