The way you respond to Life is (the only thing) in your control!

You have a choice of being happy irrespective of your circumstances.

A friend called me this morning. She said she was grieving over her inability to convince her mother-in-law that she (my friend) is a dutiful daughter-in-law. My friend has been married into the family for over two decades now. She rues the fact that her husband too has been unable to talk “some sense” into his mother. “I feel worthless, stupid and wasted,” lamented my friend.

My friend’s case is yet another classic example of people trying to desperately control everything in Life that’s beyond their control. 20 years is a long time for someone to be married into a family. If she has not been accepted by her mother-in-law as a worthy daughter-in-law, why must she waste time trying to prove her goodness out there? Why crave for something that is not coming to her in the natural, normal, course?

This is the tragedy of our lives. We try, all the time, in vain, to control Life. We try to control people, events, relationships, careers…everything…and, quite simply, all these are beyond our control. And so we grieve. That’s why we suffer.

To be sure, you agonize in myriad ways over why you can’t get things under your control. Your child’s in her teens. And she has a mind of her own. You are unable to control why she’s on the phone, on Facebook, and aloof from all the household chores she used to help you with. You grieve. The person who you once loved deeply, married, and thought will be your companion for Life, is now estranged. You want to control him. But he’s moving further away. You are now wallowing in self-pity. You are just not able to understand why you are not finding a job. You are qualified, experienced, talented and intelligent. You have double degrees, but no job. So, you desperately try to control the situation. Offering to work for even half the salary you were drawing. But no. It just isn’t happening. You are devastated. You have always had a strict health regimen. And you now have an arthritic condition. You are unable to run your marathons. You want to, you try to…but you land up in a bigger mess with your back and knees. You are depressed.

You may resonate with some of these situations. Or you may have some other. The point is that each such instance reminds us that we can’t control Life. We can’t really control what’s happening to us in Life. Life is about phases. When your Life’s going through a particular phase that you dislike, it is not tormenting you, as you often imagine. It is inviting you to challenge yourself, to endure and to overcome the phase. Unemployment is as much a phase as romance is. Bankruptcy is as much a phase as parenthood is. When we allow ourselves to be consumed by grief, when we are being tested by Life, we miss the opportunity to live fully, to live happily! So we suffer endlessly – ending up becoming depressive and morose.

Remember that the way you respond to Life is (the only thing) in your control. When you respond with grief and sorrow, imagining your Life to be a tragedy, you miss the opportunity to be happy. Instead if you respond saying you will live through any phase, no matter what, you may go through enormous pain, but you will not suffer. To be happy, irrespective of what circumstance you find yourself in, is a personal choice you can exercise.

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You can either be bitter about Life, or get better with it!

Simply let go of your desire to control people and be at peace.

A lady we know has been served a divorce by her husband, who has moved in with another woman. Her two sons are too busy building their careers overseas – they don’t have the time to intervene in the relationship tangle involving their parents. So, they send their mother money to provide for her living expenses. And Life goes on for the lady.

But when you meet her, you will not find her bitter. She’s very cheerful, at peace with her Life and her reality – accepting it for the way it is. I ask her how she can be so calm when there’s every reason to be frustrated and grieving. “See, it is a free world. My husband did what he thought was right. My two sons are doing what they think is right. I am doing what I can do best – be accepting of my Life and going on with it, without feeling bitter about it,” she explains.

I find great value in the lady’s perspective. All of us are living an interconnected Life. It is impossible not to be impacted by other people’s choices. Someone’s actions, at some time surely, is bound to cause us stress and angst. But therein lies the challenge and the opportunity. If we are going to respond to everyone’s actions, demanding that our sentiments at least be respected, we will spend all our lifetime fighting. I know it can be difficult resisting a good fight, especially when you feel you are right and that you have been wronged! But if you think about it, to be sure, no amount of fighting someone can necessarily convince them of what they must be doing. So, a better option is to simply let go of your desire to control people and live your Life with dignity and equanimity. If you respond to every provocation you are bound to lose your sleep. Period. But if you let people do what they want, and you choose to remain unmoved by whatever people are doing around you, to you, you can be sure of protecting your inner peace.

There are always two choices in Life. To either be bitter about it. Or get better with it. I will any day champion getting better with it. And you can do that only when you choose not to be drawn into people’s machinations and depressive energies. Simply, let people do what they want to; you live your Life protecting your inner peace – because if you don’t, nobody else ever will!

 

Zen while dusting cobwebs and cleaning toilet bowls

Mindfulness is the key to inner peace.

Today we spent a large part of the morning cleaning up around our home. Vaani and I simply love house-keeping. Indeed, it does make us happy.

In fact, to me, personally, house-keeping, is a meditative practice. It is not a chore. Yes, it does become a challenge when you have to juggle with your other schedules and have to try and fit in quality time for house-keeping. But I have realized that I am very mindful when I am cleaning up around the house. I go about it calmly, methodically and, however physically strenuous it may get at times, I enjoy the process. I love doing the dishes or cleaning surfaces, I invest time to get the toilets to be squeaky clean and generally love the idea of having a dust-free home environment – something that’s so difficult in Indian conditions and so requires being at it continuously, consistently!

I have discovered that when you are mindful of whatever it is that you are doing there’s great inner peace and joy. And no work or task is menial or burdensome as long as you don’t treat it as a chore. In fact, immersion really means being completely involved in, engaged in, and mindful of whatever it is that you are doing. Of course, it is possible that you may not always like to do some things. But when you don’t have a choice – and you have to also do what you dislike doing – if you choose to be mindful, you will get through that task or activity even more efficiently than when you are resisting it.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, a.k.a Thay, says it so beautifully: “In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” The essence of what he has to say is contained in the last phrase – ‘it is a serene encounter with reality’.

Most of the time, almost all of us, resist our reality. We don’t like what we are going through. Or we dislike what we have to do. Or we are so engrossed in dealing with our ‘extended’ realities that we miss the magic and beauty of everyday living. Thay recommends that we must awaken to the reality in each moment. And not just to be stuck with our ‘extended’ reality. For instance, if you keep worrying about a relationship issue you have, and keep mourning the fact that you are unable to fix it, how will you enjoy a sunrise? So, in this context, your stagnant relationship is your ‘extended’ reality. But the more immediate one is the sunrise. Enjoy it, says Thay, because soon it – the moment bearing the sunrise – will be gone. Meditation is really what the art of living is all about – the ability to value each moment, cherish it, be joyful in it and move on to the next moment with undiluted enthusiasm.

How can you enjoy a moment when it is painful, you may wonder? What if someone is dead? What if someone’s betrayed you? How will you cope with a moment when you are wishing it away? That’s why Thay prescribes a ‘serene encounter with reality’ – he says, don’t resist, don’t fight, instead accept, what is. Accepting what is, is the best way to inner peace. When you accept your reality, you begin to experience joy in the moment.

The human mind is like the human body. It can be trained. I have trained my mind by practicing both silence periods (mouna) and mindfulness – immersing myself in what I do. Over time, I have learnt to banish worry (despite the daunting circumstances my family and I are faced with; read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal.) and just be in the moment. Often time, cleaning around my house gives me that sense of equanimity. Through my own experience I know that if you immerse yourself in whatever you do, you too can be happy, despite the circumstances!

You will not awaken until you don’t encounter the messiah in you

You have to bear your own cross in Life!

“What must I do when I want to help my son but he doesn’t want my advice,” asked a friend. His son is going through a difficult time in his marriage and is planning to separate. My friend wants to be there for him and hold him through this phase. But his son wants to be left alone.

What do you do when you know you can be useful, when you want to help, but someone doesn’t want you to get involved? Simple: you just leave them alone; you just send them positive energy; and if you believe in prayer, pray for them.

Each one of our Life designs go through unique upheavals. At different stages in Life, people want to handle their situations differently. Everyone who is going through a problem, believes they can handle it. Even if you think you can help them – because you have experience, because you have expertise – and if they don’t want your help, you must leave them alone.

Now, I know, if this is a friend who wants to be left alone, you are a lot more comfortable. But as in the case of my friend, if it is a child, if it is a parent or a sibling, how can you “not get involved”? This is where an intelligent choice must be exercised. When someone wants to be left alone, their privacy must be respected. Well, if they have shown signs of emotional fragility and you suspect they may harm themselves, then you can dive in and lead them. But if it is that they want to face their demons themselves and do it their way,  obviously you have no choice but to let them be.

What is important, and in a way non-negotiable about Life, is that each one has to bear their own cross. You can support, you can offer perspective, you can hand-hold, but you can’t live their Life for them. Not even for your own child. Such is Life. Such is the truth. Only when someone lives through their experiences do they emerge happier and stronger. Only through living the dark nights and in loneliness do you learn to appreciate the value of dawn, of happiness, of companionships and family. In a way, until each one encounters the messiah in them, they cannot – and will not – awaken!

Not Successful = Failure ≠ Useless!

Waking up each day to be useful to someone, somewhere, is happiness!

A manager wrote to me saying he found our story (Read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal) irrelevant. He said, “If you have repaid your debt then there is something to learn from you. But you say you have not even started repaying anyone. And it has been 10 years. After a decade of trying, you are still a failure. I don’t find anything I can learn from you.”

I smiled at his perspective. Vaani and I are often asked this question – on how we carry the “burden of our failure”. We are also asked why we believe we what has not happened in 10 years will happen now. People wonder, only half in amazement, but mostly in a veiled cynicism perhaps, how can we still be hopeful.

I told the manager that while he has the luxury of choosing not to see a learning from our experience, we do not have that option. We only have this experience to live through. And what this experience has taught us is that it is never over until the last ball is bowled. Also, we can’t afford to lose faith in the process of Life. We can’t hide behind history and say that if a turnaround has not happened in 10 years, it will not happen in future too. That would be being irresponsible towards the people that we owe money to. And third, what we have learned is that it is possible to be non-worrying in our state; it is possible to be non-frustrated when your efforts don’t deliver the results; it is possible to be non-suffering when you don’t get what you want and are saddled with what you don’t want. We have learnt these lessons. We have learnt to live this way, happily, despite our excruciating circumstances. So we can tell you it is possible to live this way. We have deployed the power of reflection, resilience and resourcefulness in our Life. Now, if you don’t see a learning here which may be useful for you, so be it. But your choosing not to see it, doesn’t either dilute the experience or take away the learning! Most managers, because of their intense – often erroneous – conditioning see high-performance as only something relating to their KPIs and KRAs at work. But to us, as we see it, high-performance is the ability to face Life no matter what you are going through, what you are dealing with!

In a society where success is measured by what you have, than what you have learned, what you have faced, just because you don’t have material evidence to show, it is likely that you will be billed a failure. But any label that society pins on you need not stay stuck. You have a right to discard it. In fact, you must discard it. Clinging on to a label that society has stuck on you is a sure way to invite suffering and plunge yourself into depression. Understand that just because you have failed at something, you are not useless. In any context in Life, however difficult or hopeless the circumstances may be, you can be useful. Your worth is not determined necessarily by how much assets you own alone. It is also a measure of how useful you are, how many lives you have touched and how much value you have created for other people.

This is the paradigm shift Vaani and I made. We did not stop with trying to be only successful in Life; we worked on being useful too. This shift is what awoke us to a Higher Purpose of Inspiring Happiness. This is what helps us wake up each morning and keeps us going day after day after day – however hard our material Life gets. So, we have learnt that success and failure are both impermanent and are imposters, in fact. And no matter how much of a failure you are in worldly terms, it doesn’t mean you are useless. There’s always something that you can do that can benefit someone, somewhere. Doing this consistently, which is being useful, regardless of what we gain, to us, is happiness!  

 

An old man sleeping on a busy street serves up a Life lesson

Develop the ability to stand in the throes of everyday Life situations and be peaceful.  

Yesterday, on a busy street, I found a man sleeping peacefully on the pavement. It was rush hour. Traffic came from all directions. People honked mercilessly. The din was unbearable even within the air-conditioned Uber I was riding. As the traffic choked for a while, I kept looking at the man on the streetside, on my left. He didn’t appear drunk. He must have been in his 60s. He had a thick woolen blanket covering him. The temperature must have been 35 degrees Centigrade around then. Rather unusual, I thought, for someone to cover himself with a woolen blanket. May be he was sick. A half-full, one-litre Aquafina bottle stood beside him. Two-wheeler riders came perilously close to falling over him as they balanced themselves against the narrow pavement on which he lay. But the man went on sleeping. There was a certain peace about him. An equanimity that was unmissable. I didn’t want to intrude on his privacy so I did not take a picture of him.

The irony was not lost on me. Here was a man, perhaps surely homeless, whatever may be his physical condition, who was at peace with himself and his Life. And here are so many, many people searching for inner peace all around them. Isn’t it strange, I thought!

The very fact that we search for “inner” peace outside of us should tell us that we have got it all wrong. Which is why we find our peace so elusive! Second, anything that we seek that is impermanent – all our material wants – cannot get us to anchor in peace. You may want a car today. But once the car arrives, you will lose your peace trying to protect it from getting dented on our unruly Indian roads. Then when it is dented you will grieve over your insurance claim not being enough to fix it. Over time, you will want a bigger car. And so the quest for satiating yourself with material things is an endless one. When you tell yourself that you will be peaceful, happy, when you have this or that, you are actually kidding yourself. Unless you drop all your wanting and just be, you cannot be peaceful, you cannot be happy.

This is an irrefutable, unalterable truth about Life. The faster you internalize this truth, the sooner you will anchor in peace and the happier you will be. The man sleeping on the street is but a metaphor for all of us. He invites us to pause and reflect. He reminds us that anyone can be calm in their bedroom or in the protected confines of their homes. But can you stand in the midst of your battle-ridden, stress-laden Life and be peaceful? If you can be that, in whatever context Life has placed you in, then, and then alone, would you have found the greatest secret there ever is to Life!  Which is this: the ability to sleep peacefully, regardless of circumstance, is the greatest wealth, the greatest blessing!  

Ask yourself “Is it today” daily, to come alive, to be happy!

Change what you can and accept whatever you can’t change!

Someone we know cannot somehow heal. She’s bitter, heart-broken and caught in a depressive spiral of self-pity. She had a simple question: “Why am I always unhappy?”

I replied to her that the good news is she at least knows she is unhappy. There are so many, many people out there who are unhappy, who are suffering, but they don’t even know they are unhappy. Or, a better way to state it would be to say, they are not aware that they can be happy despite their circumstances.

People are unhappy, people suffer, because they are allowing unhappiness into their lives. They are accepting conditions, situations that intrinsically make them uncomfortable. Or they are resisting realities about their Life that they can’t change. Very simply, they are fighting what they can’t change and they are not changing what they can. This lady for instance has a lousy job and a relationship problem in her personal Life. What she must be doing is to change her job, and accept that her relationship is over and she must move on. Instead she suffers in her current job and is denying that she has a relationship problem. So she is unhappy. And is suffering.

Surely, each of us has more than one situation in our Life that makes us unhappy. And the way to happiness is to get rid of anything – or anyone – that is making us unhappy. Postponing happiness is like postponing living. Just as you cannot get back a moment that you have lost in Life, you can’t go back in time and be happy. If you understand this truth about Life, you will not only want to live a fuller Life, you will want to be forever happy with a vengeance.

In Zen Buddhism, there’s this concept of living each day as if it were your last. The Buddhists imagine a little bird sitting on their shoulder to which they point an all important question each morning. “Is it today?” Meaning, is today my last day here, on this planet? This question helps them prioritize and live meaningfully every single day.

Maybe, the way to keep unhappiness at bay, the way to avoid postponing happiness, is to ask yourself this question too. Ask “Is it today” and go live your day as if it were today. What would you do if you knew today were your last day here? Would you be unhappy and lament over what you don’t have or will you be happy doing all that which made you deliriously happy, what made you come alive? If awareness of your impending, inevitable death is all that you need to drive away unhappiness, and be happy, then, please for your own sake, deploy that awareness! J