Days pass by us in a hurry. Every single day brings us a new delight and every single day shows us a new direction. We know not where the direction leads. But it is novel and we shall pave the path for the others to trod. When I started working on a research project in the lab, I had a defined project that would give me a singular answer. As time passed, I explored around my project a bit and discovered one more direction my research could take me. As I kept exploring both the directions, something new cropped up and very soon I was sitting on a pile of directions I could take. When I was pondering about this, I noticed that life was not that much different. Every single thought, action and emotion have this characteristic of divergence. What is true today does not remain true tomorrow. The conviction and connotation of truth is not the same from day to day. Change has affected every little thing possible. The land beneath my feet has not been a constant. The friends around me has not been a constant. The crushes in life have not been a constant. The work, the books and lots more- everything has taken different directions.
When I came to cross roads in my project, I had the freedom to choose multiple routes, explore them each a bit and continue with the most promising one. In reality, I am afraid, we make a choice and we just progress on that choice. To turn back to the fork is not going to work as every little thing influences our life and we are changed because of our choice. Every single fork that we choose upon stays in our mind, dulled by the repetition of memories and dulled by the richness of experiences of every single second since then.
As a mark of progress towards an academic doctoral degree, we write journal articles at some point of time. I would write mine by sifting through all the data that I have collected over the course of my work and try to make sense out of it. It is these data points which we interpret to mean a lot of things and it is these data points that define the direction of our research. And as we look back, choices that we made while facing forks are what have defined us. What we thought of our choices lends to understanding ourselves; What others think of us are shaped by those choices as the rest of the world perceives. Somewhere along this way, we understand what life is about; about social customs that are deemed appropriate; about impressions that we try for and impressions that we obtain; about the million other things that dont make sense when we just perform them.
In research,there are a lot of things questioned and we have the liberty of falling on previous literature to try and understand whatever we study. In life, despite the presence of numerous biographies and autobiographies, we tend to think every situation is unique and we tend not to understand lessons taught. True that every situation for every person is unique. However, the lessons learnt seem to be pretty universal. We go through every situation learn things ourselves and berate ourselves for not having understood the lesson earlier- pretty much like research.
As I think about this and write this piece, I hope that when life flashes past in my memories, I would feel that I have been a pretty good researcher. As much in life as in science
