January.

My mom's cousin dropped by today to take her out for dinner. We chatted for a little bit, and she remarked on how quickly the past several years of my university education had gone by. I replied by saying it was, in fact, the contrary - it felt like it had gone by pretty slowly to me.

Of course, that wasn't entirely true. I've written about this before: time doesn't really seem to me to be going by quickly or slowly. It just goes at the exactly the pace that it does. Seconds are seconds, hours are hours, and yes, years are years. I obviously kept this to myself as it didn't really seem like the kind of conversation to be dropping this sort of observation in.

Anyway, it has been several years - six, to be precise - since I started my undergraduate studies at Manipal in January 2013. It's January 2019 now, and I'm rushing to submit my thesis. I say I'm rushing, but I use that word rather loosely here. In any case, I'm confident of being able to finalize it by next week, insyaAllah.

I've already been thinking about what I'm going to do next. That PhD scholarship option seems the way to go at the moment, assuming the terms and conditions are satisfactory. The monthly allowance could be supplemented with a part-time job at (preferably) a bookstore somewhere, leading to a fairly healthy income.

The other option, of course, is to not further my studies and get started with my career. What that career will be, I honestly don't know yet - the thought of having to deal with office politics makes me never want to work with other people, ever.

But enough about that. There's still so much uncertainty with regards to my future that I find it tedious to talk about. At this point I've more or less given up on coming up with concrete, detailed plans for my future because they've never worked out. I've come to accept that the path Allah wants for me is better than anything I could ever come up with myself. It's sufficient to just know where I want to go and make my way there; how I get there is up to Him.