A fresh breath of freedom - Get a mouthful.

I feel it at last, as refreshing as the early morning sun - freedom. Freedom indeed.

Is it freedom to be as I want to be, to be able to question everything that I once took for given and conventional and be pleasantly surprised to find that ?
Is it freedom from hidden prejudices that my (as yet naive?) vision can't spot at a place as international as LSE?
Is it freedom from being forced to do what everybody else's doing?
Is it freedom from being forced in to assertive cliques of nationality, religion, caste and language?
Or is it simply freedom from constraints - self imposed and once deeply embedded(Thanks to a culturally strong society), but of which I was unaware of?

Whichever it might be, I might get as many a mouthful as I can- to stay this way - before I eventually go back into a society that perhaps shares only a few of my notions of freedom, as of now.

That elusive milestone called success. When does it come?

Do you keep thinking of times when there were no worries at all, times when you were a kid, or when you were at college that you perhaps consider to be the best parts of your life thus far?

And all those difficulties that you currently live through - of living alone in a foreign land working with slavish devotion for some professor in some lab, or studying hard to make it through one more of those never ending exams to make it into one of those prized firms or working very hard without taking time off at all - are necessary to achieve a goal, that is of paramount importance to you.
And after you reach this goal, you hope to be perhaps as happy or even more happy than you were in those heydays, as when at college or as a kid.

As children, we are taught that we need to pass through these difficult times to have a better time ahead. So each time we had to do something we didn't like, we were told that this is one of those last few times we would have to do it - and thereafter only good times lay ahead!

But these difficult times seem to just keep coming as we overcome one and wait for the next, until we perhaps decide that this would be the last we can take ?
A majority of us would have now come to terms with it, we now extend it, or may be extrapolate it to understand that these difficulties have to be endured until the final goal is reached, the higher the goal, the more the difficulties!

But is it the right way of going about achieving a goal ? I think not.

In my opinion, a success story would have no difficult bits to it, each and every moment would be cherished and thought fondly of, as any other. It's just a matter of realizing that. So successful men would enjoy every little bit of the path, and there is no reason why they would not keep going if that's so. Simple, isn't it?

The difficult bits come in only when you don't like what you're doing, but which you think have to be inevitably gone through.
What makes them inevitable then? - Indeed, they are avoidable if you choose so. There are things that everybody else's doing, which you don't really like but you can't see yourself not doing them simply because everybody else is. If only you choose to be different....

If not...

Then you should perhaps take a look at your goal again. Otherwise, you'll have to stop at a milestone that you could possibly showcase as success to people who stopped much before you did, but those who pass and those who keep going, they will know what it really is. Won't they?