The Lighter Moments

Do you always find yourself sickly sweet & primed by some kind of emotion driving you crazy? Mind you, that may be anything. Worry, ambition, happiness, stress, frustration, impatience. While you walk, is it the fact that your eyes are seeing things, but nothing gets registered in brain as it is awfully busy processing at full capacity analyzing the things you choose to think on? If yes, then you are the member of the HMWS club. I mean Heavy Mind & Wounded Soul club. A mind & a soul overloaded by unnecessary thoughts & convictions that borrow significant part of your personal power, leaving you stressed, exhausted & forlorn.

We all, consciously or subconsciously, do add weight to our moments. Let’s see how we can draw out some mass out of them to make them lighter & hence easy to bear & more savory.

An example to cite on. My own. I really didn’t think I was capable of scribbling few lines on paper (Or shall I say strike my PC keyboard?). One clear day, I summoned the valor to start on & slashed few lines of my first ever writ. But then on, owing to versatile décor of English, the goal post shifted from putting on thoughts towards presenting good language. That’s why; the stuff I had presented earlier required a lot of effort. Effort in putting it together all the chaos inside, in the consciously measured words. Flow of thoughts was there. But drive kept shifting more towards keeping language difficult & hence impressive than conveying thoughts (The things we take time to understand impress us, no?). Over a period of time, as a sane thinker I realized this & decided to make it all a bit lighter, easier & hence human, henceforth. The spontaneity of ideas should indeed be dealt with the spontaneous words one can recall at that moment. And they never can be those toughies! So there I was, a simple dude, going about the world around him with the simplicity that he considers one of his bestowed virtues. My first conscious effort towards making the moments lighter for the writer inside me!

One of the most prevailing things that make mind vulnerable to the misery is refusal to acceptance. Acceptance of defeat & truth. This usually happens with people when they try to deny things as they always watch the world from the eyes of what they perceive themselves to be & not through clear, open eyes. So whenever they face failure, they stumble. Because they consider every option on the earth acceptable save defeat. They deny reality & choose to think it doesn’t exist or it’s not that grave, just like the poor little cat closing its eyes while slurping the milk. They try to wipe out the reality, unaware that they are getting wiped out by reality. Life is full of uncomfortable situations & you can’t avoid them. The pull of them is stalwart. Strong enough to make the moments still heavier. Instead, if these failures are seen in a light of opportunity to learn where you can cobble together, they can just be the blows to shape you to the perfection. Occasional confessions made with sporting approach are perfectly normal. Indeed, to walk tall & unperturbed while the hammer is on, you need to show a great deal of courage. But that’s the price of perfection when you choose to trade with your fate demanding the life of your choice.

Hesitate to compromise? Yeah, I’d like to hear honest answer. That is, Yes! This is another inflexibility of a man. I would like to share one personal experience. In my organization, as a part of HR initiative, exercise sessions are arranged where employees participate to get groomed in various management practices. In one of the sessions, we formed four teams which were regarded as four dummy companies which were to compete globally to acquire the customers. All four were given Rs. 1 crore each & they could use the money for dealing with other companies for customer it has. One full hour of chaotic bargains, dealings and negotiations was over. Results were put on. And to dismay of all, everyone seemed to be left with lesser money, fewer choices & struck business. This all happened because everyone was primed with only one motive. To win & beat the other. But in this, the need to acquire the customers was overlooked. When chances seemed deem to win, everyone was putting efforts to see how the other can’t get what he wants. There was a chance when two teams could have compromised & one could have won while other could still have earned some customers. That way, we could have had a winner & runner up. But the latter company saw to it that former didn’t get the customers of its choice. Result? Both lost. This is a classic case of what happens in professional rivalry. And seeing today’s competitive life, we fall to this predisposition to move ahead as well as keep others behind, adding weight to the moments we have in our hands. As I propose, if the need is given a priority, such a competition becomes an attempt to trade best effort & excel rather than keeping the opponents down.

What’s the common thread binding the people close to each other? Relationships. Man likes to socialize & everyone is of course keen to build & nurture relationships with others to form his close circle of buddies. Friends with whom laughs & tears can be shared together. In doing so, everyone invests in something called as “Favor Bank” where he himself has an account. He deposits favors to others’ account in the bank & withdraws favors from those accounts when he needs. But at times, this investment fails to earn dividends. We help our friend in need but when it comes to pay off, he simply denies or dithers to lend a hand. Still keeps demanding occasionally. Now a common individual, with all his kindness, finds it difficult to refrain from aiding. But each time he obliges his friend, the feeling of being robbed keeps harassing him. Time gains weight. Life gets loaded. Solution to this problem lies in your calculated sternness to his demands. If he is told how unfair his claims had been, in clear but compassionate tone of voice, perhaps he may learn this facet of his behavior which he was unaware of in the light of your discussion. And if Mr. Demander continues to bug you, say “No” & walk out of commitments. After all, even a relationship is a give-and-take deal.

As they say, your past success or failures are enemies of your future achievements. This because the past life increases our inertia, obviating us from being what we are capable of becoming. James in “The Zahir” of Paulo Cohelo felt the same way. He discovered he was destined to be a writer. But started off being a lyric & ended up being a successful celeb in his field. But then, he kept on hesitating strongly to write a book. Since he knew that as he was a bright spark as lyric, people will use his fame as a barometer for his writing as well. And if they find it not worth the effort, he would have been defeated not as a writer but as an achiever. Which of course is not acceptable. Upon persuasion of his wife, he decides to write a book finally. Eventually it hits the bestseller list & then starts his journey as a celeb writer. Time passes adding eminence to his name. And after being on top of the world, again at some heavier moment, when an article in some magazine is asked of him, the same inertia haunts him again refraining him from being the best writer he was. We meet the same indecision when we are challenged or asked to do something different that demands courage, effort & an inevitable change. Affected, often we accept the challenge emotionally, unprepared, and end up under doing to our ability. Result? A disastrous conclusion. Or we push the responsibility to some later moment or avoid it completely for being on a safer side, bearing the load of the moment, unable to dispose of the hopelessness. Our writer opts a funny way to let go of his past. He starts telling true story of his past to one of his companions & soon starts feeling dropped off. Space gets emptied after he escorted all the false dignity, ego & frustration out of his mind. He then fills this space with positive thoughts, commitments & dreams. And after a period of time, realizes that he is now capable of enjoying each day of life as if there were no tomorrow. And most important of all, he gets rid of the bug, called fear of unknown & uncertainty. The time becomes as light as a feather.

Everybody has his own ideas of heroic in human being. Somebody he adores, appreciates & respects. We are very conscious of the way we present ourselves, aren’t we? That’s because we constantly try to find the reflection of that heroic in our projected image that we sport when we are amongst people and are seen, judged & weighed. But this makes the real person inside you hide behind the layers of secrecy, semblance or arrogance. You are guarded because you are afraid that you can be seen through, exposing your weaknesses. Each moment you live, you borrow & put on something that is not yours. This only makes you unstable, anxious & worse- unreal. This pretension may even lead to a point when you loved ones start moving away. And an invitation to HMSW club is there at you door! I thing being original is the right to way to exist as only then you are comfortable and sure of yourself. You are at ease with the things that happen to you & give up taking life a way too seriously. And then, as Spencer Johnson describes, you learn to laugh at the blunders you made & start moving with your cheese wherever it moves, to have it & eat it too!

As Robin Sharma in “A Saint, a Surfer & a CEO” describes, your journey ahead, towards discovering yourself is not to be what you think you should be but what you had been as a kid, as a unique individual. When you start off in the journey to rediscover yourself, a regular dosage of courage & willingness to bring about positive change only help make your moments lighter & you start enjoying the adventure. And when you have voyaged ahead in your life being a ship in a stormy sea, you enthuse to find the new, strong & happy you. Because then you realize that ship is safe at the shore. But that’s not where she is meant to be. And striding out the way into ocean not only assisted her in seeing the new things, but also taught her to fight the odds out of her troubles & fights.