On aiming right

Lets start with a contrived tale.

A kid wanted to learn aiming his slingshot. A friend of his was an expert so the kid asked the guy to teach him. The two of them went to the backyard and the expert said “You see that small temple, right? We worship there, don’t hit it.” So the kid promptly took aim at the fellow’s dog, which yelped in pain and scurried off. The expert was livid with anger “Now what made you do that!” he fumed. The kid said “Why didn’t you tell me not to hit the dog also? Better, why don’t you just tell me what to hit, instead?”

If you think of our minds as the kid, our bodies and brains as the slingshot, our efforts as the stones aimed by the slingshot, you may realize we sometimes behave like the “expert” who knows what not to aim for, rather than the other way round.

The thought dawned upon me over the past couple months as I spent a lot of time in soul-searching and goal finding. I needed to figure out what I wanted to be and how I wanted to live my life. Over time I had jotted down quite a few thoughts such as “I don’t want to remain a software programmer all my life”, “I don’t want to stay in USA forever”, “I don’t want to have to worry about money in the future”, “I don't want to be lonely”, and “I don’t want to marry just for the sake of getting married”.

Along the way, I noticed that most of my thoughts were stated in a negative way. Rather than go towards a definite target, I was trying to go away from something: be it my current job profile, future financial insecurity, loneliness or making mistakes in marriage. The thing to note is, though I wanted to away from unwanted things, there was nothing I wanted to go towards. With nothing to aim for, I ended up stagnating in the same place where I was, away from unpleasant things, but not anywhere close to the things that would make my life better.

And so I started feeling frustrated. Life became a drag, like a stream on which I was simply a log taking a ride, knowing only how to avoid getting stuck in the bushes and creepers, but not knowing where I was going, and worse, not knowing where I wanted to go.

So I tried eliminating negative goals. For example, rather than say “I don’t want to be a software programmer”, I tried “In the next 3 years I want to analyze and design applications, interact with customers and manage development teams; following which I want to move into upper management”. Rather than say “I don’t want to marry just for the sake of getting married” I tried “I want to only marry someone I love, understand and care about”. Instead of “I don’t want to stay in USA forever”, and “I don’t want to have to worry about money in the future”, I substituted “I will return to India after I save 20-30 grand more, over the next 2 years”. And I committed myself to re-evaluating all these goals every 2-3 months. Because life changes, and you have to adapt accordingly.

It was very hard at first, I must admit, because I was approaching specifics. Just like an obese body refuses to be driven to activity, my mind was used to the comfort of being non-specific, and wanted things to stay that way. But once the inertia was eliminated, the difference was astonishing. Just by restating goals in a positive way, I had narrowed my aims to a set of targets I wanted to achieve. Realizing those targets was now only a matter of making the right choices and putting in the right amount of effort. Even better, in the process, I began to understand my abilities, my feelings, my desires; I realized I wanted to pursue some hobbies and enrich my mind - I began to understand myself. And the joy of those discoveries can only be experienced, not described.

On destiny and ways to live life

For almost a decade now, I have wrestled with a single question: How does one live life? I have not found the answer yet, but I seem to have accumulated enough material to create a blog post..

I have studied and experimented with many different philosophies about life, and all those seem to be right at one point or another.

You have The Gita telling you to perform your actions and dedicating them to God, without expecting anything; for we all have been created with some purpose and the world is a big puzzle where we all fit in; aparently. This concept in itself is fine. But its easy to twist around in a fatalist way, many people (including myself) using it as an excuse to accept defeat, while others have used it as an excuse to avoid all action altogether.

You also have religions such as Buddhism which advocate renunciation of all desires. Essentially, the basis of that channel of thought is desire leads to sorrow. So to eliminate sorrow, you eliminate desire. However when I tried it, there seemed to be a loophole in this thought process: you end up with a desire to have no desire. And if thats not messed up enough, what do you do when you realise that the world has gone by while you renounced all your desires and so-called worldly pleasures? Not to mention the fact that you could have atleast nurtured a good desire to take care of your family and maybe do something useful for society.

Then, you have the new-age motivational thinkers exhorting you to follow your dreams. The logic being, ultimately everything has its own risks. But when you do something you also desire, you are better equipped mentally to tackle the problems that you face. Some people misconstrue this is recklesseness, while others use it as an excuse to be reckless. Some others lack the patience thats needed when following such a path, because in life nothing happens over one day. Things take days and months to work out, and expecting miracles in a short term only leads to disappointment later when you realise that some defeats are imminent no matter what you do. The other side is, its hard to take some risks when the future of your family depends on you.

By far, the most practical advice I gleaned was from the book "Who Moved My Cheese", recommended by someone whose judgement I trust. The book didnt expound any new philosophy. Rather, it made me understand the simple fact that life is always changing. And what matters is how fast you can adapt to those changes. You fall in love one day, you switch jobs another day, you take a new challenge some other day. You are better prepared to take on the risks associated with these changes when you expect change to occur. That makes you more receptive and you start looking out for signs that signal the onset of a new phase in life. Ofcourse, you also get tired when you only see changes, because its extremely exhausting and frustrating to always chase a moving target. But you cannot complain about something that is anyway out of your control. The best you can do, is adapt.

After going through all these mind and personality benders, I have realised that none of them really works always. What does work, however, is a healthy dose of realism, confidence and discipline. It helps to know what you are capable of. It also helps when you know you have people in your life who will be with you when it counts, especially your family, and your spouse, if you are lucky enough to be married. Above all, you need to have a lot of self-belief and faith in yourself. Its amazing how many people ignore that one detail. They have faith in God, and forget that when God created them, they were also endowed with enough good qualities as well to build a good life. At the end of the day however, the ones who are left standing are the ones who believe they can.

In the words of a famous person,

"

If you think you are beaten, you are,

You've got to think high to rise.

You've got to be sure of yourself,

before you can ever win the prize.

Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or swifter man.

But sooner or later, the one who wins

Is the one who thinks he can."

Of things good and bad

Once I met a person who would go out of his way to help others. He helped me a lot as well, to get on with my life. I admired him, and yet, could not fathom why he would do such a thing, for such is the paradox we live today - we hope people will help us, and yet are completely confounded when people actually help us. So anyway, one day, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked him.

His response was simple, and to the point: "Because I can, and more importantly, because I have received a lot myself from others". This did not seem very satisfactory to me. After all, he had a life, and a family to take care of. Why would such a person with so many worries waste his resources on someone else, who would probably not even help him back? Pat came the reply, but more detailed this time

"See, life is not only about what you will get. There has to be a balance between what you take and what you give. I once knew a bania (vendor), who, for every loss he incurred, made sure he obtained atleast twice the profit elsewhere. While at his shop one day, I thought of applying the principle in reverse. From that day, I made a pact with myself - for every say, 3 or 4 good things that happenned to me, I promised I would try and do something good for someone else. It did not matter whom I helped, or how big or small my help would be, as long as I helped. Obviously, I cannot maintain a 1:1 ratio, of the good things that happen to me and the good things I pass on, because I have my own responsibilities to attend to. But I also ensure that my responsibilities and worries do not become an excuse for not helping others.

In return, this helps me in ways more than one. For starters, for quite some time, I had been feeling like a sink - because I was receiving a lot of help from many people, but had not given it back to anyone. Helping others gave me a sense of immense satisfaction, and made me feel I was finally part of a bigger circle, where good deeds pased on from person to person. Strangely enough, for each good deed I did, I kept on receiving more and more back. And obviously, the more I kept on receiving, the more I felt like giving back - something like the compound interest concept. ."

I sat back and thought a bit about what he had said, while he took a phone call. When the call was over, I had one last question for him: "What happens when something bad happens to you. Do you pass it on as well?". The fellow smiled at me and said

"Bad things happen in life. I accepted that long ago, its a rule, and so its out of my control. However, what I do know is that I can control my reaction to a bad incident in my life. When something bad happens to me, I know I have two simple choices: have a bad reaction, or a good reaction. I have never been able to completely ensure that my reaction is good. I may bang my fists, I may say bad things under pressure, but still, the desire to respond in a good way takes over and I go into damage recovery mode. From then on, things get better. Mind you, whatever be my reaction, I try to ensure that no one else is adversely affected by it.

So, to answer your question, No, I choose not to pass on anything bad that happens with me. I would rather absorb the bad, because just like good things lead to other good things, bad things lead to more bad things if allowed to propagate. Let me explain with an example. Its like a big nuclear reactor: each bad thing can potentially lead to 5 or 10 more bad things unless someone steps in and absorbs some of it. If no one steps in, you have a big, uncontrolled chain reaction, which in time can only lead to an explosion.

By absorbing - or atleast making an effort to absorb - some of the bad things, I know I am making a difference. That gives me the strength to go on."

Having said that, he turned around to take another call, while I left his office to ponder a little more. As I stepped out, there was a smile on my face and my mind seemed to be a little more at peace...

On character, boringness and sin

A friend recently made a trip to Rome, where he and his family attended mass at the Vatican, and were fortunate enough to be present when the Pope gave his address. After reading the transcript of the address, some lines lingered on in my mind, I have pasted some extracts here:

"... The human being does not trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbors the suspicion that in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is a rival Who curtails our freedom and that we will be fully human only when we have cast Him aside; in brief, that only in this way can we fully achieve our freedom.

"The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.

"He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death.

"Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live. The freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared freedom, in the communion of freedom: only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop.

"We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth of our being, and that is, in accordance with God's will. For God's will is not a law for the human being imposed from the outside and that constrains him, but the intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him the image of God, hence, a free creature.

"... [in our minds] we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring and that something is missing from his life: [we have a lurking suspicion that] the dramatic dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin, and to want to do things on one's own is part of being truly human; [we have a lurking suspicion] that only then can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; [we have a lurking suspicion] that we should put this freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, fully ourselves.

"In a word, we think that evil is basically good, we think that we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being."

"We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary."

(The complete homily can be viewed online on many websites, such as "My People")

The words above give us a reassurance that its still OK to do what your conscience thinks is morally right, to stick to what you think you would do in the absence of peer pressure. For, like they say, the cosncience is also like a kid - that kid speaks out only when you listen to it; and the more you start ignoring it, the muter it grows, till one fine day you realise you have lost it. No one is given a strong character but there still seems to be hope that we can make it stronger, by listening to the whispers of our conscience when we are at a moral crossroad..

Those little things that can be done

"What I can do, I must do"

These words are attributed to Rippan Kapur, founder of CRY (Child Relief and You)
When I first read the line, the words leapt out at me, my mind seemed to stand still as I let the meaning sink in. Apart from the obvious meaning - that if you can do something good, you must do it, no matter how big it is - there seemed to be something else that I was beginning to realise.

Too often we go through life thinking about us, ourselves and our life. I do not say that is wrong. In fact, it is the prudent thing to do. If your life is not moving the right way, there's no use trying to put someone else's life back on track.

But what we fail to realise is that help need not be something big like putting someone's life back on track. Somehow, our minds assume that people can be helped only in a large-scale manner - that help is good only if we do something big which inconveniences us or causes us pain in some way. Wierdly, the possible degree of trouble involved seems to be a measure of the help offered, And then, that becomes an excuse for not helping.

Nothing could be farther from reality. There many small things we can do, to touch the lives of others. If you look back on your day or week so far, you may probably be able to identify atleast a few things that you could have done, some way in which you could have been nice to someone. Maybe you could have given up your seat in the train. Maybe, you could have taken the trash out in your office, rather than let it sit and stink there. Maybe you could have offered a cab ride to the lady waiting for another cab to show up. Maybe you could have given up your place in the line so an old person could go home sooner.

However, in some strange ways, we seem to have trained our eyes, ears and mind to ignore all such opportunities. Rather than doing what we can do, we spend time convincing ourselves that we may repent having helped the person. So we dont give up our place in the line because we are afraid of being late to work, we dont take out the trash in the office, because we feel then the cleaners will get into the habit of not taking it out regularly, and we dont give up our seats in trains, because we are afraid of getting exhausted by the time we reach home or work.

Thats why the words seemed to stir something in me; they made me realise, it doesnt matter what you can do, or how small it is, but its alright to just do it, if you think it will make someone else feel better. I have been lucky to have met many such people, who have made me feel happier by their innumberable small actions. They have inspired me to behave in the same way. But it would be a much better world if such behavior were the rule, not the exception.