A Leap of Faith
“Just close your eyes and take a leap.”
I sometimes wish that my father’s advice were as easy to follow as they sound. But as I sat there on the airplane, tied to my destiny with a thin seat belt, leaping looked like the most difficult thing to do (despite already being in the air). I was on my way to a new life, a new beginning, and my father was there to drop me off. I knew he could notice the fear in my eyes for I wasn’t my usual self who got excited over shapes of clouds and sunrise and mountains and all other little things while flying. “Technically, I’ve already leaped, and there is no going back. All I can do is wait and see how the landing goes”, I wanted to say. But instead, I chose to stay silent and stare out below to the vast stretch of clouds.
Moving to India wasn’t an easy decision for me. It doesn’t even look like a big deal when you rotate a globe and have difficulty in figuring out that Nepal (my home) and India are two different countries. But when you think of it as moving to a place where you don’t know a single soul, it gets scary. Just the thought of it gave me jitters; it gave me chills. It’s during a leap like this your mind gets bombarded with all the what ifs of the world. And the worst part is there isn’t a way for you to know it yet. All I could do was look at the clouds and wait for them to rise higher and higher while I touch the ground.
After I landed, my fear became valid when the cab I boarded dropped me off at IITD instead of IIITD (talk about communication gap). The feeling of loneliness got worse when I had to use the phone number of the Vodafone staff as an emergency contact number while taking a SIM card because I literally didn’t have a phone number of a single person in this country. All through this, all I could do was to ask myself what I was doing here.
But again, I had a good reason to be here. I’m a firm believer in living a life on a move. You can’t spend your entire time confined inside a valley and call it a life. I want to go to places and meet people. Not just as a tourist, I want to be a part of the places I visit. And there can’t be a better way to do that than moving to a new country, with nothing but a hope to build a new family, and spending four most important years of life doing the same. This is my life philosophy, and I wanted to make it my way of life as soon as possible. After all:
“There are only so many tomorrows”. -Michael Lander
After struggling for the first few days, I’m finally happy with the decision I made. In a month that I’ve spent here, this place already feels like home. Although there still are some things that come as a shock to me — like the fact that people here eat curd with chili-flakes and salt, and not as a dessert (why though?) — I’m glad that I chose one of the most diverse and interesting countries of the world to spend four precious years of my life at.