Ideas come like pulses, they seem to strike anywhere and at anytime. For me, ideas strike the most when I’m in a crowded bus, especially during my journey from college (Maharajgunj) to home (Bhaktapur). It’s confusing that ideas occur to me when in a congested space amid sweaty, apathetic people who are boiling over like water. It may be because the journey, no matter how noisome, gives me time and space to forget all my to-dos and gives me a certain freedom: Freedom to think spontaneously. It may be because the journey gives me a sense of inner peace that this tends to happen. I do not know the answer.

But the important thing to remember here is that no matter how brilliant the idea seems, it becomes futile as soon as I get out of that crowded bus. One day, an idea popped up in my head. It was about opening a fitness club. I knew that the fitness industry was growing day by day. As we enter a digital age, people have started caring more about their appearance and with increasing population and decreasing playgrounds; people need fitness clubs to stay healthy. So, it was a good idea, I thought. But then, as I made my way home, slowly one by one all of my to-dos appeared in front of my eyes, like a wall that prevented anything else from being thought.

“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea,” apparently this was said by the Buddha and as spurious as it seems it is also relevant and important, even in the capitalist world we live in. We are selfish. We dream high. We are ignorant. But in the end we are all in search of a formula that will make us successful ie money, fame and automatic happiness. We often motivate ourselves with apocryphal sayings and quotations by so called successful people, such as “Failure is a seed to success,” forgetting that we have never even experienced real failure, because we are too afraid to put our cherished ideas into action. We tend to choose the easy path: A stable job in a company, a good salary, a somewhat happy life, but we never stop dreaming high because we are never quite satisfied with just that mediocrity. But again, the bitter truth is that we are too afraid to put ideas into action. Thus, ideas are like pulses, they are signs of life and if you cannot bring them into existence, they will disappear.

Phuyal is an A-levels graduate from Budhanilkantha School