Cycling The World | Kamran On Bike

Six years ago, if somebody told me I would be travelling by bicycle for several years, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Oscar Wilde said, “if you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.”

Once, I too considered my career a punishment, a sentence I had passed to myself. It is not to say that a PhD in computer science and a software development career in Germany were not the dreams that came true. But those dreams were no longer mine.

Society conditions us from such an early age that we rarely get to discover who we truly are. It’s not our inner voice but the modern reward system guiding us to what we should become. And one day, we do become something in the name of our destiny. But deep within, we know something is missing—the feeling that comes when the heart is not in the right place.

I had this feeling for a long time too. It is never easy to leave a career you spent a lifetime establishing, in my case 37 years, something that also took a lot of sacrifices from your family. “When the crops were ready to reap, you walked away!” my elder brother always says to me.

But, once the realization of self insignificance in the infinite universe hits you, along with the feeling of mortality and our minuteness on the scale of the eternity of time, everything, no matter how crucial, becomes irrelevant. The only way to get out of this dark situation is by breaking free.

Our careers don’t have to confine us, for ours is a wondrous spirit. When something doesn’t excite us, and there is no adventure and fun in what we do, we die inside.

Society will always impose its view on us. It will create walls around us so we cannot see what lies beyond. It doesn’t want free souls lest the old world will collapse.

But it is for us to climb those walls, discover our passion, and endlessly chase horizons. There are infinite dreams and infinite tracks along those endless horizons, but all paths will converge to one, the one which makes our heartbeat and stars float in the ocean sky. There is a reason for our being. We only have to keep going; until the horizon and beyond.
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