- 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
Three questions for you
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…
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…
How slim is too slim?
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 :)))
A relationship of 10 years!
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!!!
Five fave one-liners
- 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.)
What does true hard work mean?
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.
What an influencer!
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 🙂
Warm milk vs cold milk
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.
Does love die?
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.