Plan Change

By the year 1982, I was planning on spending the rest of my life with this company, after all, it was a nice job starting at 9 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m.

  
I’d been through a few rough patches during my job, but things on the money front were fine. At that point, I was almost sure that I’d found my dream job, and now I can live a decent life. My wife had no complaints either, as she never interfered with my personal decisions.

But then there was something pinching me at the back of my mind.

"Would I spend the rest of my life with this job, really?"

I wasn’t thinking in terms of changing my job, but I often thought about my dreams of traveling and this job had nothing that provided me any opportunity to do that.

I must accept that even if my traveling plans pinched me at times but I was doing nothing in that direction, nothing yet, but I knew it would only be a matter of time. And that time came when my wife said, "What about your love for traveling, your photography?

She knew I was madly in love with these two, and I was happy she said that.

Oh, I should have told this to myself, and it shouldn't have come from my wife.

Fast forward to the next month in 1983. I was sitting in my DGM's office in Delhi, requesting him to transfer me to the marketing department. My DGM knew me personally, as he often came to the factory where I was working as an apprentice before joining this company. He used to come to meet our chief engineer and other senior engineers several times a month.

He told me about the terms and conditions to join the marketing department that I knew myself, but I took a chance. He said, Are you ready to go for a management course?"

I didn't think for a moment and said "Yes." He said, "It would all work out in time, maybe two years. Are you ready to spend two years in a business school?

I was still committed to living out the rest of my life with my dreams. Of course, deep down, I was having my own doubts about whether I would be able to manage two years without a salary.

That evening I came back home, and my wife buried all my doubts beneath a facade of hope and optimism. She was the one for my hopes and dreams, right?

She said, "We’d manage, I will rejoin my job. Things would get better in time, right? I can start working again."

Nope. I thought that would not be fair, and I kept thinking and telling myself that this was my opportunity, but how? This was the one for me, and that was my love for my dreams, but then reality couldn’t let me make a decision. It wasn’t until a week before the next salary day when I opened my eyes that morning and said, "Yes, let me take this risk."

I told about my changed plan to my wife, and she unexpectedly started asking some very deep, personal questions—questions I was terrified to answer. I was evasive. She started smiling and asking, "If I had trust in her?"

That’s what finally did it; now I see what I should have seen much earlier. We had a changed plan for our future lives.

And it was on that fateful morning after I reached my office and met my DGM and said, "Yes, I was ready to go to school."

I was asked to meet my HR, who was as stunned as my other coworkers, but I was firm on my decision. My HR wanted me to think again in case I wanted to change my mind. But no, I was ready to take the risk.

On that night, when my wife bucked me up, she told me she had already received a nod from her institute and she could join as and when she was ready to do so. I found myself in the most tense yet relieved circumstances, and this all changed the course of our future irrevocably.

Now, I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life working as a 9-6 factory worker, but my fear was inevitable. I was going to miss her for the next few years and also during the time of my travel and that feeling of pain of loneliness had started in my subconscious mind.

And, over four and a half months later, when my first semester was over, I was glad I changed my mind. Me and my wife knew exactly what our plan was and how we were going to cope with the situation. Everything was going to be right with us in the next few months, and we were going to bring back the wonderful times we had in our early days. I was feeling now that if I had stayed in that old job, all my dreams would have died before they surfaced on the ground.

And now, when I think back about my wife, who dared bring me back on track, a level of experience, confidence, and emotional maturity that I didn’t think about before that decision she took so easily.

Changing my mind about not spending the rest of my life with my day job, my wife gave me a wonderful choice to make—a decision that I saw when I was eighteen. But I finally did it, and there was no going back. Oh god, am I glad I changed my plan?

Beneficiary @moriom
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Better Life with Steem|| The Diary Game||15 September 2024||