Category: Life

A year is a long duration of time, and its passing has been eventful. What used to be a running tally of the various cuts and brusies in the year past has now mostly turned into a feeling of gratefulness; that, I am still able to, rather selfishly, enjoy the presence of most of my loved ones in my life. The days to come continue to be steeped in uncertainty, but I have slowly learned to set that aside and take every little bit of love, companionship and good fortune that is there today.

That brings us to time and that there is so little of it. As I have grown older, the realisation has only grown stronger that time is really relative. 3-hours spent on something that was not that important is a lifetime wasted compared to not being able to spare 5-minutes earlier for someone who is no longer in this world. No amount of hours that I can set aside in the future will not bring those 5-minutes back.

It has also been a year of trying to pick the right battles to fight, admit to everyone freely my limitations; that I can’t be everywhere and maximise my time with people who allow me to be who I really am, all warts included. That has been a liberating feeling like nothing else. To live a significant portion of my time not driven by guilt and also not have the same guilt drive most of my decisions has been a revelation.

As I go further down this path, I am awed, everyday, by people who don’t waste their time being anything else other than their true selves. It is an exhilarating way to live to be the truest version of yourself, for no other reason than it being exactly who you want to be. It makes battling the million other things that go wrong on a daily basis well worth the fight.

There is no longer a destination or an objective to this journey. If there is one that resembles it, it is to live the best life possible every day. I’m exceptionally lucky that a significant number of days turn out that way, even on days when I have done not much to make it happen. Regardless, I will take each and every one of them with wide open arms.

I am looking forward to 2019.

I grew up not alone, but lonely, in a largely conservative small town in south India. Television was a novelty in those times and the programming on it was quite limited and heavily controlled by the government. Books were really my refuge and even at a very young age I had an extremely well-defined sense of what was wrong or right and I am quite ashamed to admit that at that time I had little flexibility about it.

But that is a topic for a different time. What I wanted to write about was that I would often find myself at odds with my friends, family and the society in general about what I considered right or wrong. For most of my life I have not been able to understand the roots of my strong convictions as my reading at that time could not have covered everything I was opinionated about, nor did I have a mentor through those years who could put those ideas into my head.

While reading the ‘Tibetan Book of Living & Dying,’ the concept of reincarnation and the carrying over of key values rang a familiar note in my mind. Was it possible that I am carrying over a value system from a previous life? As someone who does not believe in reincarnation, it is a difficult concept for me to agree with. On the other hand, it is also not quite possible to accurately ascertain this, as opinions, unlike some skills, can be acquired subconsciously at any stage of life.

I guess the moot point at the end of the day is that your core values exist within you in some form all the time. Like any skill, they have to be worked on, made sharper and clearer and developed over time. But it is difficult to acquire a value system that is not yours over time. You could, probably, fake it, but I doubt if it would ever be intrinsic to you.

The interesting question, then, is: do you believe most people have a value system at the their core that is more good than bad?

I’m sitting here watching the light dance around the shadows, successfully avoiding them every time. The only sounds are mostly birds and numerous insects that I can’t even see, the odd rooster and the creaking of the bamboo trees. For a year that broke every plan that was made in it, I am ending it with a feeling of extreme gratefulness. 

I have gone from living in an eternal dread of losing those who matter a lot to me, to appreciating each reprieve as a gift worth no money in the world, even if it is just for a few days before another scare shows its face. Every day, every conversation, every joy shared is something that I greedily cherish now and I keep wanting more. And every reprieve is almost like starting all over again. I now understand how dogs feel towards the people they love.

The one great benefit of most plans and wants not working out is that it slowly forces you to stop getting attached too much to them. I would absolutely love to see all of them come true, but the discovery that life has a lot to offer even when they do not work out has been kind of revolutionary. In hindsight, it sounds perfectly logical, but learning and living it has been one of the hardest lessons I have had to learn in life.

One of the biggest changes I noticed rather late this year has been that I like sobriety a lot now. I can imagine doing nothing with it as probably the best use of sobriety, but there is something extremely nice about being able to experience things without having an intermediary re-interpret it for me. Be it elation or exhaustion, knowing that what I am feeling is precisely what it is makes my life a lot better. I am certain that I am doing a pretty poor job of explaining it, but that is kind of the best I can do about it.

Every now and then, I do find that blinding moment of clarity where I am being as sober and as clear-headed as I can and yet also feel that I cannot control a thing in my life, maybe with the exception of how I want to be to myself and to others. You can see the pieces fall together in a random order, giving the impression of order and purpose, while an absurd approximation keeps it all going together. Yet, I do not feel perturbed by it.

In a lot of ways it brings me back to what I used to feel many years ago, that everything is meaningless and amounts to nothing. Most of our core beliefs are constructs that we frame to make sense of the chaos we call the world. My question then, to myself, used be “that being true, would you continue to do the things you have done so far, if they are all so meaningless?”

The answer then, as a means of flipping a bird to life, was an emphatic “yes”. That “yes” is still there, but the conviction behind it has changed. There is an incredible pleasure in being able to give love and receive it without a fear of losing it or a fear of being taken advantage of. No fear in the world prevents loss or being taken advantage of. And I do not want to be ever constrained by that fear.

As always, I am not sure where life will take me in the year to come. More than any of the previous years, things are far more uncertain, but I am looking forward to what is coming my way, even if it will be things I have not accounted for, or even things that I do not like.

Have a great 2018.

Even when I used to have a lot of time to spare, patience was not really one of my best virtues. To hold my ground and let life do its own thing was a concept that I could never grasp at all. As you can imagine, the lack of that virtue put me in situations that could have easily been avoided numerous times.

As I have grown older, it has become a bit easier to be a wee bit more patient that I was in my younger years. The reason why this turnaround happened is because of the fact that when you have a few more responsibilities other than yourself, sometimes, all you are left are bad choices. 

When you have to choose between two bad options, on certain occasions, life affords you the luxury of time. You can sit it out for a bit and wait for the circumstances to change. And, on more than a handful of occasions, I have seen this work out well. Just sit and do nothing; or don’t change anything.

That said, it is not easy to be patient. And even worse is the case when you know, more than ever, than time is precious, but you have to just hold your ground and let life do its two bits. Once the responsibility of what you do (in this case, what you do not do) sets in hard on you, it is hard to just shrug it off, do some crazy thing and run away.

I’m not sure this grown-up-adult thing suits me at all. But that is the game in town right now.

From as far as I could remember, I was always a terrible student. Taking instructions has never been my forte. Three words into anyone telling me about something, I would drift away into other worlds, even if the instructions were of a very important nature. But I have always loved learning things so that I could solve a problem.

A problem provides a finite outcome from which I can retrace my way back to a knowledge/ability/skill that helps me get there.

This, predictably, created significant challenges in my academic life. I could never really find much meaning in studying so much of theory, while, at the end of studying it all, you could still do not a lot or solve many real-life problems with it.

Understandably, people could not understand the stubbornness with which I would not make an effort, often marking it off as laziness or lack of interest. For me, it was just a case of I could not see the point in doing it if I could not solve a problem with it.

It was a means without a fitting end.

Of course, having grown up into an adult, I do see the point to it. Outliers cannot be the norm in any system because that would result in chaos the system cannot handle. 

That said, I do sometimes wonder, how it would have been to be in an educational system that had outcome-driven the norm.

It has been another hell of a year. Since it is no fun to go into the “did not think it could get harder” trope, I will not do that. The idea that the hard bits are an interlude is an idea that is wrong. If you live a responsible adult’s life, there will always be tough parts to it as the norm. The trick is in finding the most optimal way to deal with it and still, somehow, find the time and means to do the truly spectacular things. And this is something that everyone goes through, just that some make it look really really easy.

The tens of thousands of words written about living in the moment (and for the less disciplined, the day) and not looking too far ahead is made as quite an emphatic point when it is forced down your throat. Life changes in a rather dramatic fashion when the point is made, again and again, that you control very little of it and even the little control that you seemed to have is mostly a trick of your own mind.

I have gone from “living the moment” on a whimsical trip to the mountains that I undertook while being answerable to nobody and nothing to “living the moment” for the next 10-minutes. Because, that is all the time I will get to spare today while a pile of things stack up and a good chunk of them do not work out. This makes for wonderful writing when you have the luxury to sit back and elaborate on it when things are OK, but it makes for some really hard living when you are battling a stream of things that continually go wrong.

On the other hand, you can trace a direct line for all that to my insistence on not settling for less than what I think is ideal. At every stage, where I have chosen otherwise, it has been a disaster and once you choose this path, you have to grind on through a lot of rock before you hit that speck of precious you have been looking for. Naturally, the question arises — is it worth all that effort? If I am honest, I must say that on bad days, it feels terrible. You feel like such an idiot for ploughing what is often a lone furrow, while others seem to have it easy. On all the other days, it feels like the only right choice that is there.

A superstition that I seem to have acquired along the way is that if I publicly acknowledge something good, something terrible happens to it immediately. Logically, I know, that is not the case. Both good and bad things happen to everyone all the time, but we tend to remember the bad things more and what can be considered probable cause. The things will happen anyway, whether you wrote about it or you wore the unlucky yellow shirt is just your way of finding a way of apportioning blame or a simplistic explanation.

On an unrelated note, after getting a bit too battered with events in the past few years, this year, I started therapy. It was a trying experience initially. But, over time, it helped me manage a lot of my anxiety and my incessant guilt tripping. It did open up a lot of other fronts, because, after all, a successful process will end up making you feel more and also make you feel a lot more vulnerable. Overall, I am glad I signed up and it has been easily one of the best accomplishments of this year.

Did I say earlier that life has been terribly hellbent on making me live the moment? That is what is there to be said about the coming year. There are so many things that I want to do, but all that is happening for the foreseeable future is holding ground and putting together little pieces, one at a time, without getting too invested into what the puzzle will finally reveal, if it reveals at all, that is. We still do not know what will happen in the months to come. We have never known what will happen in the months to come.

Living that knowledge is the biggest thing for the 2017.

You have a great 2018.

In a couple of years, I will turn 40. Which is a strange age to be at as people don’t tell guys much about turning 40. There is a wealth of literature out there for women as it also happens to be the age around which a lot of physiological changes start or are about to start that are irreversible. In general, it is a far more difficult time for women (which is true in any case, the age notwithstanding) than it is for men. 

The twenties for me was mostly a blur, a decade of constant chaos and persistently being on the edge and little leeway in terms of opinions I held and even less leeway in terms of accommodating opinions others held. I really don’t remember much of what it was like being 25 or 28. Lots happened, which does not help and I was drawn to chaos, like a moth to a flame. Come to think of it, it is easier to remember the time because of the year than the age.

The thirties have been a different ballgame. From the slowdown the body starts exhibiting in the early part of it, to the active management you’ll need in the second half, your body makes you much more aware of how much of work goes into keeping the bag of cells, liquid and energy on the road. There are people who are at their peak in this age group, but it does not happen on its own and they really do earn their keep with it.

One interesting thing I do notice is also how I perceive death and mortality. Earlier, my thought on dying used to be one of relief. I do not know what would happen after that, but least I know that I won’t have to deal with a thousand things that I really dislike about daily living after that. Now there is a bit of thought about how my loved ones will be taken care of, how to provide for them etc. Then it comes back around to recognizing there is not a lot I can do about all such things and try to live as a better person.

The other aspect that I seem to have come around to is not being able to live a regular 9-5 working life. I had experimented with it for over a year and it is soul-crushing. The commute, the politics, the culture built around hoarding knowledge and talking people down — are things I can manage well at all anymore. Being able to make time for myself is a critical centering mechanism for me and going months without having time for it is really difficult.

That said, it is not easy to make a good living without being part of that circle as work and working environments that value and respect another person’s time and presence and their skills exist in places that are not around a lot and it takes a lot of looking around before you can even find some of them. 

The last big change is more related to the times we live in. The world itself seems to be in a mad race to try and work itself into a fit of rage and anger. The overwhelming liberal bent that was there most of my lifetime seems to have replaced by one that is cowering in fear of a thousand things — some of it valid, some of it imagined. We are replacing evidence-based beliefs to affront-based ones that seem more inward-looking, closed and a far less friendly a place.

There is a certain helplessness that prevails as values that seemed to at least aim for something lofty, brave and noble all seem to have gone like dust in the wind. The world is being transformed right in front of our eyes, with tools that we never doubted could be put to such use. I fear my old age will see this cycle peak and destroy and transform pretty much all that I value. I do not particularly cherish the thought.

A-year-ago, on April 10th 2016, we lost our son. He did not even have a chance to see any of the world that we were so eager to share with him. It still feels very odd writing this down as he was, till his last moment, as complete and as real as a human being could ever be and yet there was very little that we ever really got to see of him. The 12-months that followed has been extremely trying, beset by various health issues, an ongoing battle with cancer in the family and challenges related to work and other things.

The loss of your child cannot be expressed in words; or by any other means. I do not know how do people ever come to live with it. We have struggled our way through it and often times it has been extremely hopeless. It is similar to trying to heal a hurt somewhere inside of you that you cannot reach. All words of comfort and all sorts of logic eventually fails at the simple point that we lost him and there is absolutely nothing in this world that will bring him back.

I have been through so many battles in life and pulled myself out of them all, one way or the other. The scars from those battles always remain, but the dismemberment caused by it has been devastating. It has taken considerable effort for me to occasionally go beyond the fact that I failed him and that every thought — good or bad — must be ended with that thought as the only conclusion.

All these multiple brushes with mortality has left a crushing impact as I now know how real the loss can be. With all else that has gone on, including the cancer, my own life’s self-indulgence has been whittled down many a notch. There are days on end where life comes down to living just the current week, day or just the few hours of normalcy that it affords at a time. There is often no tomorrow as you do not know what it will bring and a lot of days it only serves to bring more frustration or bad news.

With age also doing its thing, it makes my own place in the world something I wonder about. At best, I am looking at another 20-years at the most of being able to make a significant contribution — that is if I am lucky enough to live and be functional for that long. The work I do from here-on has to amount to something more than just helping me earn a good living. It has to be meaningful and help people live better. It has to be something that I really believe in.

The last 12-months has left little of any belief standing. My own hubris regarding a multitude of things has been decimated because of everything that has happened. It is the greatest challenge to overcome as this is a fight that is for life itself. To live in fear is to experience a slow drowning of sorts. The first step is to be able to overcome at it as it is not life to live in fear that way.

I did not write the end-of-the-year note for 2016; which is what I normally do when a year comes to an end. 2016 was the straw that nearly broke the camel’s back. I have rarely been this out of touch with what is going on within; nor have I felt this lack of gratefulness for all the good that is there in life.

2016 was expected to be a year of big welcome changes, before it turned into a nightmare of a loss that hit really hard. Failing health of ones close soon followed. Meanwhile, volatility or chaos in nearly everything else continues to be a difficult shadow to dodge.

The lack of gratefulness hits particularly hard. On one hand, I am acutely aware of the privilege I have, while, on the other, the recent difficulties prompts various convoluted coping strategies to kick in and drains out all the appreciation for the privilege I have.

Somewhere along the way, I swapped the freedom, of knowing that it is only the present I have to count on, with the fear of a future peppered with more losses. How can the exact same thing turn around and evoke a totally different reaction compared to what was there earlier?

It is not a lack of awareness, strangely. In fact, it is more acute than ever. I can pinpoint the evolution of my coping strategies and how differently I react compared to my younger years. There is more resilience and responsible behaviour, but it provides scant relief from the unexpected episodes of gutting that happens ever so often.

There are so many other puzzling aspects too. For someone who used to be really comfortable hiding in a crowd, I am now really not able to handle crowded places, people and a lot of noise. Perhaps, it is that peace, quiet and silence are hard things to chase down these days for me.

The is also little urge left to charge at anything anymore. Both mind and matter feel weary. Familiarity pushes things on, but the plunge through the depths of an endless mourning continues. I am not sure if it is the darkness that is refusing to let go or if I am refusing to let go of the darkness.

Travel continues to save the day. We left behind a beautiful home to live out of a suitcase for a month. We met nobody that we knew in that period of time and felt the happiest we have been in recent times.

There is something deeply comforting about seeking asylum in the familiarity of strangers.