Following the instinct

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
— Don Marquis, American humourist and author

Welcome to another episode of Through The Looking Glass. As you read from last week, it was a struggle to not lose my identity, from what my society expected of a girl and her capabilities in the 80’s. I gave up the dream job of being a Schlumberger field engineer – and with that all my dreams of adventure and wanting more than the provincial life folded like a house of cards.

And so, I settled. Married too fast though I was not really ready for it – because ‘girls should not be alone and wandering around’ and ‘Start a family, too much independence is a bad thing’, I took the ‘respectable’ job of teaching Physics and Maths at University Malaya and followed the ‘natural order of how life should’ be as society dictated.

I am going to bet there are too many of us who chose a life not of their own desire because society expected them to do ‘the right thing’ whatever that was. Too often we live our life through the eyes of everybody else, except ours.

We condition ourselves, our talents, our happiness and even our future to get validation from the people around us so that we can chalk up a whole lot of brownie points that we keep safely in an imaginary box of achievements. But who are we actually living for?

We go through life ensuring we are always seen as the good man or woman who always follows the system, does the right thing. Which is noble and commendable, but why do we allow ourselves to believe that what we REALLY wanted to be or do was not the right thing?

The heart wants what the heart wants. And the heart knows better than the brain because the heart’s desire is pure instinct with every single fibre, nerve and cell in our body telling us that we are right. And I have learnt over the ages to never doubt my instincts – it has proven time and time again that it was always right, no matter how much the brain tried to override it at that time with proposed logic that it has learnt, from what society teaches it.

I see too often, young people who have given up what they really wanted to do because their parents told them to pursue something else that fit the parents’ expectations. They went against all their instincts to please someone else.

Like the wife who tells the husband he cannot have that Harley Davidson of his childhood dream because she thinks its wasteful and they could spend the money elsewhere, and he agrees but something dies inside.

Or the husband who tells his wife that she should lose her career as they have enough money and she obliges but feels empty inside, not knowing who she is outside the family.

At some point though after all that pleasing and obliging, the heart wants what the heart wants. And we rebel. That was me. I wanted my adventure. I needed the adrenaline rush.

I loved teaching, don’t get me wrong. I worked so hard in creating the right kind of excitement for what was considered a dry and difficult subject that within three years my Physics class was surprisingly the largest elective. But the feeling of stagnation was terrifying.

Every year I would have students graduating and going off to become somebody doing exciting things in the corporate world – having their own adventures – and I would be always standing on the sidelines encouraging and cheering them on. Life was passing me by – and it was terrifying to not make an impact in the world.

When I got pregnant with my first child, I knew deep inside I was not doing myself justice by not making a difference to either me or my unborn child.