- Life is beyond the thing called email and notifications.
- You will be admired for your honesty. However, before that, you would be rebuked.
- To not believe what most of the world beliefs, is the biggest level of chill.
- You create your life by what you do. So platitude.
- It’s okay to say no even in the most joyful work of your life.
Tag: truth
1. What if you didn’t check social media for the next 5 hours?
2. What if you read for the next 10 minutes?
3. How many people would be happier if you were just happier and more human?
Believe it or not, the phone IS responsible for all the problems.
Believe it or not, work from home is causing issues at home and at work.
Believe it or not, we need to be more grateful, not more depressed.
Believe it or not, reading good books does solve all the problems.
Believe it or not, we need to make time for free time daily.
Believe it or not, it will only get better when we make it better.
Believe it or not, meditation, good videos and morning and night affirmations ARE magical.
Believe it or not, but in our hearts, we know that what we spoke above was the truth…
A few days back, a relative called up on my birthday.
After exchanging pleasantries, they said, “I have heard that you have gotten very slim.”
“Yes, you have heard the truth,” I laughed that off.
“No, but very, very slim I mean,” they shot back.
I used my fun tone again, and asked, “But you would be still commenting on my looks even if I gained a lot of weight!”
“O, even that’s the truth!”
The truth is, no matter what you do, someone will figure a way to raise a question.
If you are kind, someone will ask you to be stern.
If you are stern, someone would want you to calm down.
If you are formal, someone would want you to be more casual.
If you include casual conversations, someone would want you to stick to the point in official meetings.
There are always going to be people raising a question on you.
The question is:
What is YOUR truth?
What do you want to do?
How much weight you want to gain/lose?
How do you want to set up your relationships?
Do you value kindness more than anything else?
And when you know what YOU want, here’s a repetition for the nth time:
It DOES NOT matter what others say.
Some good friends figure out a way to chill.
Most others figure out a way to negatively thrill.
Focus on the former, and life will never be still 🙂
PS: I don’t talk to my relatives per se, but this time I had to, because of my birthday :)))
It was June 2011 when my friend dragged me to a seminar after college.
It was “Aadarsh Amdavad”, a 15-day self-help workshop, that consisted of:
- Daily 2 hour sessions by an acclaimed speaker
- Had a spectrum of audience instead of a narrow group
- It did not want us to “get better”, but the way it was designed, ended up making us better.
After that fortnight of daily wisdom, I felt a surge of happiness that I didn’t want to let go of.
So I started walking to Crossword Book Stores near my college, after the workshop got over.
For hours, I would just sit there and read, not knowing I was getting into an affair it would be impossible to get out of.
For hours, I would not care about anything in the outside world, just me and the books.
For hours, daily, it was a retreat from everything else in the world!
That love affair has lead to a lifetime partnership with books now.
More than anything else, keeping myself lost in that world has lead me to find myself, over and over again, peel by peel, page by page.
Here’s to a decade of that relationship 🙂
Here’s to a relationship that is with you ALWAYS…
Here’s to a lifetime of companionship!!!
- We are our strongest when we listen to our inner voice more than what our idols say.
- The only birthday preparation introverts make is turn on phone notifications the day before.
- The doers have one core value: They never talk much about their future plans. They just let their work do the talking.
- When someone asks you: “How you did it?” and you stumble for a bit instead of showing, “This is how…”, you’re truly humble.
- Do it even if your parents disagree. They will disagree to things they themselves said once. Why not actually go live your life? (PS: Disagreement does not mean being disrespectful.)
Hustling. Grinding. Slogging in the hours.
All of this is pop culture’s definition of hard work.
Except that it’s false.
True hard work is when someone’s good or bad deeds do not invoke a reaction from you.
If the above line seemed difficult, it may be possible that you’re just wasting your time instead of doing the real hard work.
These days you are learning a lot about my meditation retreat experiences. You’ll have them coming more, for the coming few days.
So while on that retreat, I happened to meet an influencer who stays there in the ashram. And when I went to meet him in his office (that was adjacent to the room he stayed in), I was stunned by what I saw!
While the ashram is big, I had thought his room as well to be one.
But that’s what his room was a reminder of: giving, sacrifice and living as who you are – not as what you want to show.
And meeting him was indeed a wonderful experience 🙂
Have you tried drinking plain cold milk? Without sugar or chocolate?
If yes, you know it has a calming effect.
Alternatively, if we drink warm milk without sugar, it is kind of weird. We need to add sugar to make it a bit better.
That is how life is. When we are chilled out, we are sweet naturally. When we are hot or angry, we have to make efforts to get sweetness.
We decide, which milk to be.
Love is like a plant, it is supposed to blossom.
In the initial years, it requires a lot of care to grow. If we are careful about that for at least a decade, it will automatically nurture itself later. Then it would become the strong tree, that gives shade and does not require much of nurturing.
But if we don’t nurture it in the start, it does wither. And slowly goes away.
Coming to the question: Does love die? Of course it does. When we don’t nurture the first few years with care and trust, be it in any relationship, nothing is left. If it is a relationship we cannot run away from, such as family, we learn to accept them – but there is hardly any connection. If there is a relationship that we can go away from – a partner, friend, business relationship – the best we could do for them is bless them!
Love, btw, begins with yourself. But that’s for another day.
1. Think in questions.
2. Don’t send that email.
3. Surround yourself with the right books.
4. Workouts are therapy.
5. Dance, baby!
I did not love myself at all, when I was in two toxic relationships:
- You’ll look good with this.
- Wear this, don’t wear this.
- Quit writing your blog.
- Quit preparing for CA.
- Just quit, just listen to me and I will love you.
I lol at myself how I was such a fool to call such instances “love”.
Anyway, those were idiotic steps on my part. But today I received a finalised video about a project that I’m working on. And life’s come a full circle!
Don’t know what would happen to this project, but I’m glad to have never quit and didn’t choose this kind of “love”.
If you have a choice between love and career, do they really love you if they don’t love your choice for your career?
PS: In the new project, I was looking exactly opposite of what these gentlemen wanted me to look like. Self love is super power! Happy Valentine’s Day peops! Hope you love yourself 🙂
Some life lessons that helped me today, might do that to you as well:
- Communicate. Don’t think this is obvious. People don’t love surprises, and so won’t we when we will realise our assumptions didn’t exist with them.
- People need love. Even when they give you hate. Once you get to this balance of giving them despite what they give you, you will be unconquerable.
- There is no black and white. Try looking for grey things, that will help you out.
- NOTHING can substitute learning from good books and knowledge each day. Each day.
- If you want to look and feel young, work yourself out! Same applies to the mind 🙂
You must have seen people partying on the beach on Instagram.
Or making teddy bears of snow.
And making you feel like it is your life only that is at loss.
Here’s a silent truth:
Someone I know personally posted a vacay pic of theirs, with a thoughtful caption and how happy they were truly being in this flow state of life. However, I know they are going through a really, really tough time. A super tough time.
It is great that they took a break, no doubts about that.
But here is what I want you to consider:
- Social media = away from reality. Almost always. Rather always.
- People show that they are enjoying because they have FOMO – they have also seen others showing their “happy” pics and would do anything to show that they are also happy.
- Our real nature is happiness. When we are away from it, we would do anything to get closer or appear closer to happiness. If we get close to real happiness, awesome! If we get close to faking happiness, our hole of sadness gets deeper.
Choose the form of happiness you want to live in. And the coolest of the coolest people, who are your (real) role models, they hardly share their vacay pics online with a “success-filled” caption. Because they know that real happiness is the remaining 350 days as well, when we are not on a holiday.
Read the above line again.
For yourself.
Today there’s nothing much to say.
Lost a close Uncle. Had met him two days after Diwali, last month. Little did anyone of us know that this was the last one.
While we were cordial and cool in our last meeting, I do realise that we don’t know which one is going to be our last meeting.
Lesson: Treat every meeting with people like the last one. We never know.
When you speak your truth, you live an authentic life.
No one would understand it. No one.
But you will.
And that will be more than enough.
1. If you want to capture your truth to show it to others, you have already started living a lie.
2. A great life is where you are humble even when you don’t know how to.
3. Protecting your mindset is the best insurance.
4. Challenging yourself is the best safety.
5. And a little reminder: You are the product of five people you hang around with.
1. Checking your email just three times a day is a sign of maturity.
2. You are loved. Let no social media tell you otherwise.
3. You may forgive people yet not allow them into your life ever again.
4. You don’t need love. You ARE love. Now go, give. Starting with yourself.
5. The best thing you could do to yourself is be You. Everyone else is already taken, as Oscar Wilde said.
This lockdown came along with gyms locked down.
Till March, I had reached a great weight resistance. Then began the workout at home.
Today I brought in weights from my old home, and lo, the resistance which I could carry initially wasn’t there. The reason, obviously, was lack of practice with weights.
In life, the more we continue to live with goodness, the more resilience we develop against what’s isn’t right – without losing on who we are.
If we remain where we are without increasing that quota of goodness, over time, we’ll lose it.
Over time, we will lose ourselves.
When did it actually happen?
When did I move from giving love to needing it?
When did I move from giving tonnes of acceptance to needing it?
When did I move from cheerful, super happy and full of charm kid to crying whole day?
Never have I ever waited like this. Waiting for this time to go away. Don’t know when. I have written positivity and power for eternity. Then why so much truth? Why am I documenting my rock bottom? Why?
I have no idea. Other than the fact that I want it all out of my system.
And also one more reason: The ones suffering from mental health problems are already strong. They have to muster the strength to get back up. So don’t think they need any help. They spread awareness on it so that more people could become empathetic towards each other and more cases of depression stop from coming. That is the only reason.