Going Home...

"In the end, it's not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how many moments took your breath away."
- shing xiong

I am watching this glorious sunrise while flying over China. It would have been an unremarkable experience for any other person. But for me, who had spent the last few months cooped up in Umea, a small university town in northern Sweden, this is as good as it can get :) I believe in symbols and signs......what better than a sunrise to denote the new beginnings I was flying home to !!!

Let me introduce myself. I am 34 yrs old, of Indian origin who has spent the last decade making a home in Australia. I had been away from home the last 16 months on a pursuit of a remedy for my midlife crisis which is what I believe I went through :) I gave up a lucrative career of being a senior software engineer in order to pursue a Masters in Strategic Project Management in Europe. What some people would have called a self-absorbed, egocentric and perhaps irrational wild-goose chase, I believe this was something I had to do to comprehend what I really wanted in my life, for myself.

Like most other people with mortgages to pay and kids to raise, I had been getting out of bed the past twelve years and going to a job that was merely a job and not my vocation. Not that delving into project management would change things for me, but I believe somewhere when I took the decision to pursue this course, I also decided to change the status quo. I took the risk of giving up on good money and security and decided to invest in my dreams perhaps at the cost of my family's well-being but at the end of the day, what mattered was that I decided to take the first steps to change what was not working for me.

I had the blessings of my husband who by the way has always been enthusiastically canonized by my friends for the simple fact that he lives with me :) I owe him a lot for giving me the liberty and the much needed support to pursue my dreams. However I believe it was my kids who bore the brunt of my decision. It had been an agonizing and heart-wrenching decision to leave them behind as my course entailed not staying in one place over the 16 months but moving to different countries within the EU every semester. Seeing that this nomadic life would not have suited my kids aged 6 and 3, I left them behind, but content that they were in the excellent hands of my hubby and his family.

I have been visiting home in between during my holidays and talking over skype almost every day, but distance and time have not been kind to me and my family. I cannot erase the fact that I had been away for a long time and have missed out on a lot of things related to my kids. I am now heading back home for good, in fact have already been cooped up for the last eight hours on my flight from Helsinki to Hong Kong.

I do not know what my future holds for me but for now, I am planning to take it one day at a time. I started this blog so I can start on this second phase of my journey and record my re-union with my family, my job hunting, my kids growing up, the everyday happenings in my life, and so on. It perhaps might be just a record of events to the average blog reader, but to me, it is my life that is happening on these pages and there are always plenty of moments to be treasured (and to be blogged as well :))

So welcome to my blog and get me started on this new adventure......what I call "Life" :))