Am I getting too old?

Why am I not as motivated or excited about things as I used to be? I asked a friend recently. That’s because you’re getting old Bilal, he dead panned back. I still remember when I was in my early twenties and a few kids playing cricket on the street yelled out “uncle, can you please throw the ball back to us?” I looked around to see where the uncle was only to realise they were talking to me. Age has a way to creep up on us. We go from calling people uncles to becoming them. And in that journey, we learn a thing or two about happiness, excitement and contentment.

Sometimes it feels like balancing happiness with contentment and pursuing one’s passion is like balancing Pakistan’s current account deficit and GDP growth. If you focus on one, the other blows up. Thirty-six years into living life, I’m beginning to discover the core drivers of what brings me joy and how they are evolving. As a teenager and young man in my twenties, it was friendships and professional achievement that drove my contentment and happiness respectively. On the wrong side of thirty, it’s family and routine things that make me content like taking my daughter to the park or going out to dinner with my wife and doing a gratitude exercise every morning to thank God for having a roof over my head or an able body.

I miss my friends but not enough apparently. I’m still driven by professional achievement but more on the vector of professional fulfillment than achieving status, although I don’t really know what that means. And then there’s the collision between happiness or joy and contentment. Contentment comes from savouring the beautiful life I’ve built. Happiness comes from taking risks that could result in shiny, spectacular moments of professional or personal joy but they could threaten the very foundational elements of life that bring so much contentment. How in the world is one supposed to choose between the two?

The obvious answer is moderation but moderation is joyless. The adventure of going all out and pursuing your passions is joyful. But the cost of that adventure can be debilitating too. And then there’s the age-old question of identifying whether what you call your passion is truly your passion or not. Passions are fickle, whereas contentment is solid when built on firm grounds. I’ve seen myself being hyper passionate about particular passions and then lose interest pretty quickly which makes me question whether I truly know my passions or myself for that matter.

And then there’s the big question about not being monogamous with a particular passion. I’m passionate about many things but I can’t do them all in one life. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to do them all but analysis paralysis when it comes to prioritising between them means that I don’t end up pursuing any of them. There must be a better way out of this quick sand of emotions. One that doesn’t involve struggling but letting go. Or perhaps letting go is an admission of defeat so it’s better to focus on one passion at a time and pick it randomly?

The only way to discover whether a passion is real or romanticised is to try it. If it fuels you, give it fuel. If it drains you, let it go. Or so goes the theory. But to pursue any passion seriously, you also need to work hard. And what if that work kills the joy of your passion. Is it still your passion or are you simply resisting the work? If you’re still resisting the work through, is it truly your passion? You won’t know till the results begin to come in so you have to give it a shot. At least for 12 months. That’s my new mantra. Pick a passion off my passion bucket list. Try it for a year. If you enjoy it, keep doing it. If you don’t, let is fizzle without judgement.

This is a long way of saying that there are no easy answers when you pit happiness, contentment and passion against each other. There may be a pathway though that enables them to be complementary and fuel each other. Pursuing some passions in a healthy and systematic way, while savouring the life and contentment you’ve built seems like a recipe worth trying for the next 12 months.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 25^th, 2023.

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