Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost...

I had the most ecstatic experience of my life the day before yesterday. 09-November-2022. Australia is currently hosting the T20 World Cup. The trophy is being contested by the world's top 12 cricket teams. This tournament was supposed to take place in Australia in 2020, but it was cancelled due to COVID. When the tournament was supposed to take place in 2020, I purchased tickets for one of the Pakistani matches, but they were refunded. In the first match of the 2022 T20 World Cup, Pakistan was narrowly defeated by India. Zimbabwe defeated them in the second match. They defeated the Netherlands in their third match. The fourth match was supposed to be held in Sydney. I decided to buy tickets 10 days before the game. It was a bit pricey, but I thought about having this experience. I couldn’t find all the tickets in the same row. So, I purchased tickets in two rows, front and back. The game took place on Thursday. We used public transportation to get to the stadium. I wasn'

I was contemplating what makes me happy while taking my youngest daughter on our daily walk today. To be completely honest, I don't know what makes me happy. I'm still trying to decide if I'm a happy or sad person. I'm not a happy person, that much is certain. However, it also doesn't make me depressed. I don't have any sadness or depression. I have my bad days. There haven't been many occasions in my life where I can honestly say that I've been happy. The day my baby was born would rank as my happiest day. My memory remembers this specific moment. That was perhaps my happiest moment. When I was a child, meeting my cousins, indulging in junk food and sweets, and drinking Pepsi made me happy. I loved watching movies, going on rides, and reading good books. When I had good grades or moved up in the class, I could see it on my mother's face, and that made me happy. I don't remember any nice memories from my teenage years. My adolescence was not a go

Yesterday and the day earlier, I was going through my blog. I proofread it, fixed grammatical mistakes, and paraphrased some sentences. I know I have stopped writing regularly and I can see long gaps in my writing. At times, I do feel like writing something, but I procrastinate. I need to be regular because when I go through my old posts, I realise how my life has shaped up over the years. How my thoughts, worries, and joys have changed over the years. How have I transformed over the years? Today I have limited time. I will try to complete this post instead of saving it in drafts only to be completed next year. I have just dropped my kids off at school and the youngest one is at day-care. My wife is at work, and I am at home, all alone. I must complete a solution pack by Friday, and I should be concentrating on it instead of my blog, but I want to write something. Reading my old posts yesterday, I realised how much my life has changed over the years. There has been a challenge in almo

For the past few days, I have been thinking about what made me move to Australia. I can come up with the usual answers that I wanted to collect money, get a foreign passport, or for better career prospects, but deep down I know these weren’t the primary reasons. The main reason for moving to Australia is something else. I should admit it now. I was angry and wanted to escape from my home. I moved to Islamabad, but it was becoming very exhausting for me due to travel and toxic colleagues. So, when an Australian opportunity came, I took it as an escape from my previous work. But now in Australia, I have been trying to escape from it and want to go back home to the same place from where I wanted to escape from in the first place, but I have not been able to do so. My life has been so much different now. I have 3 kids. My family relationships are a mess. I have made some money and a house. I am growing old and sad. I should save this topic of growing old or getting evolved for later posts

It’s almost the end of 2022 and I realised that I haven’t put down my reminisces from 2021. Let me think and write down whatever I remember happened to me in 2021. So, in 2021, we were still in the middle of a pandemic. Thanks to closed borders and strict COVID protocols, Australia was doing fairly compared to the rest of the world. I got a promotion at work this year. I have been waiting for it for the past 3 years. And it was not an easy one to get. I found another job and told my manager that I was resigning. So, I was on the negotiating end and got a promotion plus a very good raise. I had my parental leave pending, which I didn’t want to waste. So, I planned to take it. I had been delaying it because I was hoping the borders would open and I would travel somewhere in the world during the time of this leave. But unfortunately, borders were still closed, and my leave was due to expire in June. So, I took my leave and, guess what... I stayed at home. I watched a tonne of Netflix and