Moments after winning the T20 World Cup yesterday, during the presentation ceremony, Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, both legends of the game announced their retirement from the T20 format. Though team members apparently tried to make them revoke their decision, they were adamant and didn’t budge.
Inertia is something that affects our minds far more than anything else. We tend to invest our emotions into anything we do pretty quickly and as we do something over and over again our minds and emotions gets stuck and intertwined in them. Moving on from something is so hard to do especially in our professional lives which I found out after working for 10 straight years without a break. I was on the verge of burning myself out but more important reasons were looming in the background. As we grow older the most important things we learn and understand or should are about ourselves. Understanding more about myself and where 10 years had taken me professionally made me realize what direction to take going ahead and what I had to learn and do to take that path. Leaving a life I had built for myself was incredibly difficult but if looking ahead meant letting go of what I had then that’s the choice I had to make.
But then there are bigger reasons. Our lives were never meant to be unidimensional but that’s how we have lived for thousands of years, spending our entire lives in a single place and taking up one profession. Those who couldn’t jumped into ships and went off to explore the world. There are so many things to explore and know about and if we are stuck doing the same things forever we will never truly understand ourselves and the world. Moving on is not just leaving behind something, we should take the lessons we learned and move ahead into something else.
Then there is the aspect of evolution. The cycle of life and death is to ensure that every species learns during their lifetimes, evolves and becomes better with newer generations. Companies retire their employees because people from the next generations need to come in with newer and better ideas to take the businesses forward. Anything that gets stuck in time becomes obsolete and we are not exempt from it. We need to move on and make way for fresh blood or we will be forced to. Sportspersons, especially in team sports who call it a day do so because they know very well that they have to move on at some point in time or they will be asked to in the interest of the team and the game. No better time than bidding adieu at the pinnacle after winning a world cup.