"What Do You Want, Really?"

My uncle goes on walks almost everyday. I've sometimes seen the blue sky and the dangling wires of the earphones more than his face when my mum video calls him. In the summer, we visited my uncle, aunt and my cousins in the US. What fascinated me the most about his life is the golf ball collection that he owns and the knowledge he possesses about the same. He knows just by look which ones would float on water, which brands are more luxurious and how to choose golf balls based on your gaming preferences. Does he play golf? Not at all. Has he ever played golf? No, again.

"Why do you have all this?" I asked as I gave up trying to focus on the movie that was on. He said that there is a golf course in the neighbourhood that he walks in, and the golf balls often lie abandoned on the side of the road. It is his hobby to collect these, wash it thoroughly, set it aside to dry and then carefully pack it away in the corner of the living room (after my aunt's repeated requests). I notice the whole assembly line of this process. He then proceeded to bring in this sack of golf balls and spills it onto the floor. I sat crosslegged next to him on the floor watching maybe a hundred golf balls of all colours (the bright pink ones are his favourite, he added). This action attracted everyone's attention, and everyone crowds around the golf balls. My mum scoots closer and asks him, "Please K, give me two to take home with me?"

I am currently close to graduating medical school (hopefully). I have to make a lot of decisions in the coming months including where I want to work and train for the next two years. Everyone I speak to about this asks me- "What do you want? Where do you want to go?"

"Well, if I knew that, we wouldn't be having this discussion." I reply as politely as I can by resisting the impulse to roll my eyes. I believed it was the equivalent to when someone asks you, "When was the last time you saw it?" when you are looking for something you've lost.

I've been reading a book titled, 'How to Not Die Alone' by Logan Ury. I'll let you decide what is worse, the fact that I am reading the book with the title, or that it was recommended to me by a stranger. The book describes a category of people called, 'Maximisers'. Maximisers obsess over making the best possible decision. I'm the kind of person who visits all the gyms in the surrounding area before committing to one. I'm the kind of person who has the need to look through literally all the movies available on airplanes before I can confidently choose the one I want to watch. I thrive on researching, knowing all my options so I can pick one. The right one.

I realised that is what I was doing with my job applications. I was trying to research and understand all the different possibilities. I'd google to view the town centre of different places in the UK, the house prices, how big the hospital would be, how happy junior doctors in that hospital are...etc. It took me hours and hours of research as I came up with a scoring system with my sister who kindly sacrificed the last few days of her holidays to scratch this itch of mine.

A Robert Frost poem I read in school called, 'The Road Not Taken', comes to mind-

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could"

I realised that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to predict how my life would be in the different places. I imagined myself in the peninsula of the UK, walking along the beach with hot chocolate in my hand. I imagined myself coming home to hot food that my mother makes with my dad offering to massage my feet, if I went back to live at home. I imagined living up in a valley, learning to ride a horse in Scotland (imagine this with the soundtrack of 'Brave'). I loved all these different personalities. As I was asking for advice from a recently graduated doctor who went through a similar process only a few months ago, she laughed, "It's funny how you think you'll spend a lot of time outside of the hospital."

My sister asked me again, "What do you want, really?"

I want to be happy.

It sounds like an obvious answer but that to me was a revelation. What I really wanted was to be happy and I was looking for guarantees everywhere, trying to author my story the best I could to achieve that result. Isn't that what most of us do, most of our lives? We try to be happy.

"I really want to get into medical school."

"I really want this deadline to pass."

"I really want my child to do amazing at school."

"I really want to lose weight."

"I really want to eat ice cream."

All our 'wants' and desires, however big or small is rooted by our desire to be happy. Therein lies the secret of both our happiness and sorrow. The end goal is happiness, but we often get trapped in the belief that there is just one 'road' for it. What I was trying to do was map out the exact route so I can find my golf balls, because once we found out that the golf balls gave my uncle happiness, we all wanted a piece of that. Truth is, he stumbled upon the golf balls. If not for the golf balls, I'm sure he would have stumbled upon flamingos, or rainbows, or anything else that would bring joy. As Alain de Boutton says, "We need to show more imagination of what a good life looks like." One doesn't need to graduate from school at 18, one doesn't need to go to university straight after, or marry by 25, buy a house by 28 and have children by 30. One must simply have imagination in a society that is born out of patterns and expectations.

With that, I'll leave you with one question. What is it that you want, really?