When you can’t unentangle a mess…

Life is a function of time. Everything happens in its own time and at its own pace. So, as I share on this Podcast, when you can’t solve a problem, you just let go and let people and things just be.

Listen time: 4:58 minutes

There truly is nowhere to reach, nothing to prove and nothing to achieve in Life

If you think deeply, the journey is the only reward!

We met a friend over coffee yesterday. He was curious to know why we curated free public events across the city regularly. He was one of our guests at the Heart of Matter – Happiness Conversations event last Saturday and his question is justified. He asked: “You didn’t make a naya paisa out of such a high quality event you developed and delivered. Why do you do what you do?” To be sure, we are often asked this question. So, we are never surprised.

For Vaani and me, our Life’s Purpose is Inspiring Happiness. My Book Fall Like A Rose Petal, my Fall Like A Rose Petal Talk , the public events we curate, this Blog that I write daily, the value we create for our clients through our Workplace Happiness Firm A V Initiatives, are all part of this journey of living our Purpose. Yes, we do try and monetize whatever we can, whenever an opportunity arises. But we also recognize that not everything in Life is about making money or about being successful in a worldly sense. So, we immerse ourselves in qualitative opportunities, that come our way, where we can inspire people to be happy despite their circumstances. We consider ourselves blessed to be useful even when we are unable to be successful, for the moment, with starting to repay our creditors, climbing out of our bankruptcy and becoming debt-free.

This paradigm shift to being useful, even when there is no money involved, versus always wanting to be successful, has been very rewarding and truly liberating. There’s great joy in simply doing what we love doing, without any sense of wanting to achieve something, to earn something or to prove something. Life is very simple, very beautiful, when you realize that it is the journey that is the reward.

I learnt this lesson way back from a close friend.

My friend is much older than I am; he’s 76. I will call him ABB. He’s the consummate networker, yet he’s a very genteel person – someone who goes out of his way to help people. He has served the Indian Air Force and post his voluntary retirement, he has been a very active member of the corporate circuit in Hyderabad. He’s been an office bearer of many an industry body or management association. And has been a champion of several voluntary causes in South India. I have known him for over 2 decades now. And he has always left me inspired with his energy and enthusiasm. Even so, he’s extremely modest about his achievements and truly believes that he’s just an ordinary person – which is why I have chosen not to name him, but have just used his initials, so as not to embarrass him. Once when I asked him, why he did so much with often no evident returns, he told me : “I am not looking at name or fame. If some work or request comes my way and I feel like doing it, I do it. I have nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, nothing to grab!”

I took away a profound learning from his simple expression: “Nothing to prove. Nothing to achieve. Nothing to grab!” The way we are conditioned – both by our upbringing and through social demands and pressures – we are always doing just the opposite. It is almost as if, if you are not driven, you are wasting your Life. And the word “driven” itself is misunderstood. It has come to mean – prove yourself through your feats, your achievements, your assets, your wealth, your estates. Whereas, we should have been driven by an urge to live fully, to enjoy and celebrate the gift of this lifetime. But in order to prove ourselves, we are postponing living all the time. Osho, the Master, explains the fallacy of living this way and champions living enlightened: “Enlightenment is not an achievement, it is an understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go.” Beautiful!

The key to intelligent living lies in internalizing ABB’s and Osho’s philosophy. It means to live Life fully, doing whatever you can with whatever you have in each moment, not really worrying about what you are achieving. When you begin walking, often, the road unfolds on its own. When you let go and live, driven by the urge to live fully, and not by material goals, always, Life takes care of all that it has created. And that includes you – and me! When you realize that Life is not about achieving anything, but is about experiencing everything that comes your way, you can say you are awake, aware and enlightened!

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Place your inner joy over profits, make your living experience a prayer!

When happiness is your ROI, you are living a Life that matters!

Yesterday a guest, who I was inviting to be on my Bliss Catchers show, wanted to know why I curate this Event Series.

I said it makes me happy. “I love doing it,” I added.

But he persisted and was keen to know what I got “out of it” – as in what is my material “return on investment” (ROI)?

I clarified that, to me and Vaani, just being happy was the single-most important criteria for doing anything. Happiness is the only ROI we look! Yes, money is important. We all need money. And we particularly need all the money that can come our way because we need to climb out of our financial situation – our bankruptcy – and turn debt-free. But when you can’t get money (as is evident from our experience), you can still do what you love doing for just the joy of doing it. So, we curate Events such as The Bliss Catchers , The Uncommon Leader  and Heart of Matter – Happiness Conversations , I blog here daily and I deliver Talks even for organizations (NGOs and not-for-profit enterprises) that can’t afford to pay me a fee. Inspiring Happiness is now our raison d’etre, our Higher Purpose, for Vaani and me.

There are two parts to earning a living in Life as I have understood it. You can work for profits and you can work for joy. The ideal situation is when you can just work for joy. But you need to pay your bills, so the second most ideal situation is when you can work for both joy and profits – which is to make money while doing what you love doing. It is only when you forsake what you love, and go work only for profits, at the cost of your inner peace and joy, that you lose the plot.  You suffer and feel miserable earning all the money that you do. So, for Vaani and me, when our business failed, we decided to retain our focus and only do what gave us joy. Therefore, even when we do not always get the opportunity to monetize what we do, we go ahead and do them, because doing them makes us very, very, in fact deliriously, happy!

I have realized that if you immerse yourself in what you love doing, you lose yourself to Life; then your entire living experience is a prayer! When you immerse yourself in what you enjoy doing then it ceases to be work. It becomes your Life. Then no loss or challenge can pin you down for too long. Then your energy, the one within you, resonates with the Universe’s energy. In that beautiful communion, an inner peace, a rare joy, takes over. And your entire Life becomes a celebration, a prayer, an offering to this Universe!

 

The ageless, timeless, parenting tip – yet again: “Take a chill pill”!!!

Worrying about your children is pointless.

Vaani and I host a quarterly Event Series called Heart of Matter – Happiness Conversations along with the InKo Centre here in Chennai. At last weekend’s edition, we were in conversation with parents of special children. We talked about how parents coped with their new realities, and how they demonstrated grit and acceptance, to help their children pave inspirational paths. One of the parents, M.S.Ramesh, who is the father of entrepreneurs Sriram and Sunder Ram (both of whom were struck by cerebral palsy in their childhood) of Twin Twigs, had this to say: “When the doctors gave me this diagnosis about my children, my first reaction was ‘what next’….I didn’t ask ‘why’ or ‘why us’…I just moved on practically, to consider the next course of action.”

I find phenomenal value in embracing Ramesh’s approach and philosophy to parenting. Although we all know that worrying itself is futile, we still worry. Worse, we worry more about our children, than about ourselves, only because we feel protective towards and possessive about them.

As parents, all of us want our children to live comfortable and happily. We don’t wish that pain, in any form, touch them. Now, the truth is, what we wish for as parents is never going to happen. Our children are going to encounter pain, they are going to suffer if they don’t learn to be accepting of the Life that they get, they are going to be unhappy until they learn how to live in this world and yet be above it. Important, our children are possibly going to end up making the same mistakes that we made and what we don’t want them to make. They are more likely to reject our sage counsel than accept them. They are sure to stumble, fall down, grope in the dark, fight, resist, kick-about and then come around to discovering that their parents (aka us) were, after all, right. A young lady, in her late 20s now, we met last week said how much she could relate to what her parents had told her during her adolescent years and through young adulthood. “I feel they were sincere and profound with their perspectives. Every word rings true now,” she confessed.

So between two points of view – of the parent in Ramesh and the child in the young lady – I guess we have a pragmatic approach that’s worth considering. Keeping my focus on parenting and on parents’ tendency to get keyed up about their children, I would just say this: take a chill pill.

No amount of worrying about your children is going to make their Life journey simpler or easier. If you have children who are not taking your advice, please tell them what you have to say, and then let them go do what they want. If you have children who are dealing with a crisis that they can’t resolve or you can’t help them solve, pray for them if you believe in the power of prayer; if you don’t believe in prayer, just let them be and trust the process of Life. After all, you too have waged so many battles in and with Life to be where you are today. So simply trust that your children too will get past their crisis phases.

No matter how hard you try, you can’t live your children’s lives. No matter how much you wish, you can’t make their lives any more comfortable. No matter how much you want to, you can’t prevent them from going through their share of pain, unhappiness, suffering and catharsis. So, stop worrying about your children. As Khalil Gibran (1883~1931) has said, “…They are not your children…They are sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”