Underthought Redux

Couple of days ago, I was listening to a talk, that about 200000 people die every day on this planet, while another 250000 are born within that same time period.

It would be easy to assume that of the first lot, most would not have wanted to die, yet they died. Of the others who lived, it would be safe to assume at least a part want to die because they feel miserable in life. Of the lot that are born, none would have done anything to decide they wanted to be born that way.

It is tremendously empowering to realize that we have so little control of our lives. We may take all the precautions we want to, eat safe, live safe, travel safe, but there is always yet another way to die that we would not have accounted for.

And it is just a simple luck of the draw that we did not die today. And that same logic holds for tomorrow and they many tomorrows to come after that. So much of planning, so much of worrying; and yet, all it takes is just a small change in the universe for it all to go wrong.

Couple of days ago, something really struck me, that most problems are mostly fine with me, as long as they are problems I can do something about. Of course, I would love to have no problems in life, but you will always have problems to solve if you live.

Problems that have possible solutions are far better than problems that don’t have solutions. You just have to bear them, see the ones close to you suffer with no possible way out of the suffering.

Compared to that, problems that have solutions are just equations that need to be solved. Those are better; any given day.

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.