The past year had been quite a discovery for me. Not a discovery of a place nor of a thing – it was a discovery of self. Know thyself, said the Greeks. Now I think I have made considerable steps to follow that advice.
I had once turned to many different interests as a way to get my mind to relax from my previous day job. The work was heavy and the schedule hectic, so a good friend suggested on looking for a hobby. A good hobby, he says, is one where you can excel and enjoy. It will make great advances in your quest to alleviate stress and maintain sanity and still maintain a balanced lifestyle. Like many other endeavors I have gone to, I went far.
Now, the quest for the ultimate hobby was not an easy one. It takes time to sort out those that will help and those that will only bring in more stress. It also requires money, although there are certainly hobbies that can be done for free. Most of all, it takes an awful lot of knowledge about yourself and what you really want in life. You can fool yourself into an interest just to be cool or comfortable but deep inside you know you are not happy with it.
I tried a couple of things. Guitars, coffee, self-improvement, charcoal painting, Muay Thai, basketball, occult literature. I even tried to fancy myself as a bookworm whose real aim is to realize the renaissance man in me. I even tried math – simply because I have difficulties with it in my early days and I though that it is a good time to deal with my inner demons. I also tried being a gadget fanatic, which is just another form of a compulsive buying, only more expensive. The main reasons why I dropped these is because of either lack of real interest, money, or just plain old laziness.
It was a challenging time for me. I see many cool things to do in life but I have to settle down to something that really makes me happy. What hit me in the head is a saying of an old master: Confucius. He said, “Work for the job you love, and you don’t have to really work a day in your life”. I then figured out that the reason why I chose my day job in Accenture as a Software Engineer is because I love programming and building software systems. I also loved playing games with it as well as surfing the net. Without the documentation and other administrative tasks that I have to do with my job, I was almost living my dream lifestyle and getting paid for it.
Also, the mere fact that I am currently taking my masters degree for Information Systems tells me something about what I really want to become in life. It was almost a liberating experience to realize that most of my existing efforts, even if they were unconsciously chosen, were all directed to a common activity – hacking. From my college degree, to my masters, to my day job, even to my PSP. Everything suddenly fell into place. And it felt good.
The rest, as they have said, is history. Although that history is no more than a year in length, I have made several huge life-changing choices to align my activities to hacking and programming. As with most of my undertakings, I am planning to take it to the edge and dedicate my life to it. It wasn’t a hard choice, because by then I realized that I am already doing related stuff and all I had to do is to have the resolve to identify it and stick with it. It was really a liberating experience and it really brought me much happiness and contentment.
It wasn’t a happy ending right away, though. The mere fact that you now know what you want in life means that you have to confront those that are hindering you from enjoying it. There are many things that are associated with me that is really not supporting my interest and, for the most part, are distracting me from the more important things. Those things are worthy of a blog entry of their own, so I won’t tackle them for now. What is important is that I have identified most of them, and even disassociated with some.
All in all, my short quest in discovering my real interest and knowing what I really want gave me a freedom as well as happiness that just cannot be described by the English language. The wisdom of the Greeks, and their advice to know oneself, is still relevant to this day, if not more so. To know who you are and what you stand for gives an undeniable clarity of focus as well as peace of mind. Challenges began surfacing, but I am confident and ready for them.
The quest to know oneself is an old adage to the question of existence. It purportedly leads to gnosis or enlightenment. For me, the quest never ends. What is above, so is below, said the great adepts. If there is no limit to the knowledge universe, then there is no limit in knowing one’s soul.
