Back to School

About a year ago, when I decided to quit my comfortable, well paying corporate job to look for my passion, I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to find. I had some notions, but things were uncertain. A part of me thought I was insane. But there was another, bigger part that was sure I could not spend my life doing what I was doing, and needed to look for something different. It helped that I was moving to a new country, and I started this journey looking forward to new beginnings.

Not surprisingly, the last one year has been one of the most phenomenal ones in my life. I have had so much fun doing things that I always wanted to do - learning new things, exploring new places, getting to know myself better, and reading...oh, just reading for days at length. But it has not all been a piece of cake as well. There have been times when I have been plagued with self-doubt and fear. On some days, I have been tempted to take up a job just like the one I had quit. And there have been instances when I have wondered if risking my established career for a vague dream was worth it, or if that small part of me that had called me mad was right, after all.

However, I was fortunate enough to have a few things that kept me going. My husband’s unwavering support, for example; a community of people who believed in my dream, because they were at various stages of living their own crazy dreams, and knew it was possible for me to live mine. And more than anything else, my why - the reason I was doing this, the justification for risking it all. Like I had mentioned in this earlier post, almost all my life, I have sought peace. At the time, I was not sure how this would translate into a career option for me, but the idea had been seeded. Over the next few months, things became clearer, and I realized that after having learnt how to have more peace and happiness in my own life, I wanted to help others do the same. This finding led me to positive psychology, which is the science of human flourishing. As I read more about the field, I knew that this was the best place for me to be, because it aligned beautifully with who I was and what I wanted to do.

As the next step, I wanted to learn as much as I could about positive psychology. And that’s why, I am absolutely thrilled to share that I am now a student of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at University of Pennsylvania. I will be spending the next year studying positive psychology, and though I am not sure about what exactly will I do with what I learn in the course, I am fairly confident that this will also become clear in the next few months.

For me, it has always been easy to look back on life and see the big picture of why things happened a certain way and what I learnt from them. And when I look back on the last one year, one lesson that stands out is that sometimes, it is important to remember just why you decided to do anything in the first place, and then stand by it. In retrospect, you will find that it all makes sense.