Quite often in life, we are led to believe that we are destined to walk a single, straight path in this adventure called life. It starts from school, continues through university and then extends into our professional careers. Few will choose to deviate from this path. Us humans
are exceptionally well known for our fear of the unknown. Despite other species’ taking on risk, birds flying across continents with changing seasons, and fish migrating across oceans for feeding or mating; we remain steadfast in our fear of the unknown.

Consider Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (especially when you’re most comfortable with your life). When you are confronted by the proverbial make-it-or-break-it scenario, you have two options; you either ride the tide and let the water carry you where it may, or you struggle and swim upstream against the current to hopefully regain a semblance of normalcy.

It is human nature to gravitate towards our core strengths. However, it is also human fallacy to believe we have only a single set of strengths, as defined by our curriculum vitas. Never would we ever, for example, believe that something we once did in jest on a blog on the internet (back when blogging was cool) could actually lead to a new career path closer to our core passion. Insane right?

Wrong! That does happen. It did happen and it will continue to happen. At the time of writing this article, I had gone from organizing two races for around a hundred people each, to organizing two races for 1,600 and 975 people, respectively. And it all started with a post. On a blog. Seven years ago.

At the time, I was a running activist (an activist for the sport of running). Races had just started arriving on the scene in Kuwait, my earliest memory of an organized race being the Terry Fox Run back in high school sometime in the nineties. Coming to Kuwait to work and as early as 2010, a new race had popped up on the radar; Runq8 (now dubbed RunKuwait). From there it snowballed to every company jumping on the sport/CSR bandwagon and hosting their 5KM “marathons” much to the chagrin of English Linguists (every marathon is a race, but every race is not a marathon).

I would pay my entrance fee, wear my free tee, and run the race. Afterward, I would sit down and try to merge the passion of my profession (auditing) with my core passion of running, and formulating a little report on what I believed should be done better next year. I believed said report would merely be lost in the annals of the internet somewhere between doggo and cheezberger cat.

I kept up with the reports for quite a while, at times appearing as though standing atop a soap box in a public park preaching to the pigeons. This was done beside my regular nine-to-five, which was actually seven-to-four, then eight-to-five-thirty, then eight-to-four. It kept going on until I my regular job evaporated into thin air (refer to the article I wrote in November 2017). I was left wondering, what do I bring to the table?

So I sat down with one of the race organizers, a visionary who despite my seething critiques of his livelihood, saw not a sharp-tongued miscreant, but an opportunity to enhance his deliverables through someone who appears to know a thing or two about it.

And the rest as they say, is history. The West Gulf Race was my first large scale race, the Hannibal Race was my second. I found myself in the pastime I once pursued for personal pleasure. Therein lies the lesson. One could pursue any profession in the world, and still turn to their passion as a new career path, even though it might not be mentioned in their resume (I know mine are).

When the day comes that organizing races becomes monotonous, derived of passion, then there shall always be another pursuit to venture towards (maybe comedy?). The path we take is not set in stone, for the hand which holds the chisel, to abrogation is prone.

Like the Rubik’s Cube, Ayman Nassar is multi-colored in his interests, from running to organizing races, stand- up comedy and internal audit, plus a little writing on the side. You can find him on Youtube.com/lordaymz or follow him on Instagram @Lordaymz. Photo by Charles on Unsplash.