Facing Life squarely in the eye makes you stronger, wiser, happier

Don’t try to escape your reality. You simply can’t.

I read a story on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy, in TIME magazine recently. I liked the way TIME’s presented her story, of how Sheryl’s coped with her husband Dave Goldberg’s sudden death in May 2015. I haven’t read Sheryl’s book yet but I love its title and its focus. Basically, I understand that her book is an attempt to encourage people out there to talk about grief and to “change the conversation about adversity”.

This is what Vaani and I have done too over the last 10 years.

When we were first struck by the horrific reality of our bankruptcy (read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal) in end-2007, there was so much guilt, grief and shame in me. I would go into the bathroom, so that Vaani couldn’t see me, and cry. I would look into the mirror and insanely ask myself “Why?”, “Why me?” Over time, I realized asking the “Why?” question was futile; Life had to be faced. No matter what your situation is, it is always what it is. You cannot escape your realities in Life. Whether you are bankrupt, like me and Vaani, or whether you have lost a dear one, like Sheryl has, or whether you have a debilitating health challenge, like a cancer or depression, or whether your career has plateaued or whether you are having a relationship issue – whatever it is that you are dealing with, you have no choice but to face Life. And the only, practical, way to face Life is to accept and embrace your reality. Acceptance doesn’t necessarily change your reality. Your problem doesn’t go away. But your ability to deal with your situation is enhanced immeasurably. Look at our story – for Vaani and me, our bankruptcy – read prolonged spells of worklessness and moneylessness – endures. It’s been a decade already. But we have only grown stronger through the crisis, from our experience.

And that’s something very true about us human beings – the more we deal with any problem situation, the stronger we emerge from it. To be sure, we are all endowed with inner strength. But like the Bluetooth feature on your smartphone, you must activate the resilience in you first for you to deploy it. For me personally, the activation and deployment happened when I simply told myself this: “This is it. We are bankrupt. We have a mountain of debt to settle. We have no work. We have no money. We have two teenagers to support. We have Vaani’s dad to look after. Now, what must we do to face this situation and survive it?” That’s really what resilience is all about. Asking yourself the now-what-must-I-do-to-face-this-situation-and-survive-it question activates the resilience feature in you; in anybody.

In our case, over the past decade, we have often times, hit situations when we don’t know what to do. But each time we faced a no-go, we did the next best thing. Which is to live in the moment. That’s how we trained ourselves to be in the present and, over time, we understood happiness as being non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering. Someone recently asked me, whether I am bitter about Life – especially after “being a failure and being unsuccessful for the longest time”. The truth is I am not bitter at all. Why will I be bitter about a phase that has taught me so much about living – about living purposefully, about being happy and about knowing how strong I really am?

For Vaani and me, like it is for Sheryl, our raison d’etre now is to encourage people to face Life and not to be snowed under the weight of their problems. We are, every waking moment, Inspiring Happiness among whoever cares to pause and reflect. Our crisis has given our Life a Purpose. If you can relate to and internalize what I have shared here, your Life situation can help you discover your Purpose too.

And that brings me to a very powerful, unputdownable, insight I have gained about Life. All our Life stories are unique but the learnings we pick up are often similar. So, each of us will come to our Option B points in Life and each of us will embark on our own Fall Like A Rose Petal journey. Adversity always brings in its wake shock, grief, guilt, fear, insecurity, anxiety and a whole host of debilitating emotions. But they will torment you and hold you hostage only as long as you resist adversity, as long as you run away from it. Once you turn around and face your Life situation, when you look Life squarely in the eye, you only emerge stronger, wiser and – believe me – happier than ever before!

 

Letting go is not inaction. It means you are trusting Life to take over and take care, over time

You need to be peaceful to face Life and to last the journey. Inner peace comes from letting go.

A couple came to me to talk about their child. He’s 17 and has been on drugs for over a couple of years now. They have tried counselling him. They have tried changing his school. They have sent him to rehab. But the boy simply finds a way back into the circle that got him hooked on in the first place. In yet another attempt to wean him off the habit, they have moved him to a residential school in another city. They looked beaten and battered to me. Naturally. They wanted to understand if they had failed as parents or if there was anything more they needed to do. I could feel their pain and anguish. They have been exceptional parents: they have been understanding, they have been proactive and they have been decisive at every step. So, I advised them to stop feeling guilty. Honestly, there’s nothing more they can do for their child. They have done everything that’s practical and possible. So I said, “Just let go and let Life take over. If you believe in prayer, pray. If you don’t want to or don’t believe in prayer, just let Life happen…you go with the flow.”

The father of the boy asked: “Doesn’t letting go mean we are ‘washing our hands off him’?”

I totally understood where the man was coming from. People often think letting go means abdicating. So I clarified that letting go does not mean getting rid of a problem or situation or person. It is surely not inaction. Letting go is about practicing detachment, so that you preserve your inner peace, when you have tried your best and have been unable to solve a Life situation. Letting go is about surrendering to Life. It is about you telling Life that you acknowledge that Life is the Higher Energy. It is about confessing that you are clueless and powerless. And it is about offering yourself to be led by Life.

Seriously, consider the couple’s situation. If you had been in their shoes, you too would have done all that they have done. And then what else would you have done? What else can you do when all that you have done is not producing results? The boy has to turn around. Or, he will just stay trapped in the ruinous habit. When he refuses to see reason, what else can you do other than trusting Life?

You must understand that there are only two kinds of problem situations in Life. Those that you can solve and those that, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot solve. These are problems that Life solves, on its own, at its own pace, over time. Now, for those situations or problems that you can solve, you don’t need to worry. While logically you don’t need to worry about situations that you can’t solve either, your mind will force you to worry about them. So, instead of letting go and surrendering to Life, you keep fighting the situations imagining that you are trying to solve them! This is how you create suffering and invite misery into your Life!

Intelligent living is not about applying your intellect to Life. It is about being intelligent enough to know that you must let go when you can’t solve a problem situation! All our scriptures talk of the concept of surrender. In Hinduism it is called saranagati. It basically means being in a let-go! But because the wisdom of the scriptures are often expressed through religion, which currently is practised very divisively and needlessly ritualistically, it ends up alienating even those people who may be willing to give the concept of total surrender, of let go, a chance.

Surrendering to Life involves letting go of your ego. It is the state when you realize that you can’t solve a problem or crisis! You are then willing to go with the flow of Life. Even then your Life’s problems may not get solved immediately. But, importantly, you are not fighting them anymore. And when you are not fighting, when you are not resisting, you are always peaceful. It is only through inner peace that you develop the resilience to face Life and to last any long, crisis-ridden, journey!

“You are happy as long as you choose not to do anything that makes you unhappy!”

As Vaani and I climb up two steep flights of stairs to get to the Café Coffee Day store, where we are to meet Charukesi Viswanathan, we wonder if we made the right choice with the meeting venue. Charukesi is 78. Will he find the stairway difficult to climb? But in a few minutes the man himself arrived and scampered up the stairs easily, with the energy of a 10-year-old. When we pointed this out to him, he smiled and said that he had spent the previous night on a train’s upper berth returning from Thrissur. “Some of my co-passengers were over 80, and the one who was allotted the upper berth had an arthritic condition. So, I swapped my lower berth with him. It was no problem at all. It is all in the mind,” says Charukesi, gleaming!

That nugget of conversation sums up who Charukesi is. For one, he’s the humble, quiet, unassuming giant – having completed 60 remarkable years as a writer recently! More important though, he is the rare sort of person who is very happy and content with anything, anyone, anywhere. And what he doesn’t like – and that includes people – he avoids completely. “You are happy as long as you choose not to do anything that makes you unhappy,” he says.

Charukesi credits his father, a homeopath, with teaching him two principles that have guided him all his Life: “One is to always do your duty without expecting anything in return and the second is to work – and live – in a fashion in which it doesn’t bind you.” Expectations always bring agony, to live without them is an art and this is the key to happiness. Just as it is to work in a detached manner – doing what you can and leaving the outcome to Life. I guess Charukesi’s Life  epitomizes these two principles.

He hated academics, so he never acquired a formal college degree. Yet he has been a writer for 60 years and has worked with Pfizer, the pharma major, for close to 40 years – rising from being a sales assistant to branch manager – and has taught himself to appreciate Carnatic music. His articles on musicians, artistes and their performances, are greatly valued both by readers and publications. We ask him what is the secret of his longevity and relevance in a very crowded, ‘me-too’ space – writing. “I enjoy learning. I don’t see myself as someone who knows everything. In my Pfizer days I have attended workshops on practically everything from housekeeping to production management to quality. I have attended several programs for writers. And when I took to music, I taught myself to appreciate it attending every concert around me. So, I just keep learning,” informs Charukesi.

Interestingly, while Charukesi is his nickname, and it is also a very popular Carnatic raga, the story goes that he did not choose the name for himself. One of his friends suggested the name to him and he adopted it. But even as he did that he didn’t know that it was also a famous raga or that he would one day be known for his music reviews. “Honestly, I still don’t know who recommended my name to The Hindu. One day, many years ago, I got a call from the desk at the paper asking me if I could review a kutcheri for them. I accepted…and that’s how the journey began. I don’t think I have done anything great…it just happened,” avers Charukesi. He is not being modest for effect, I know that he means every word of what he says. At the felicitation ceremony, some weeks ago, where the who’s who of Chennai’s literary circles flocked to celebrate him for completing 60 years as a writer, Charukesi sat very, very uncomfortably on the dais. When I asked him why he was so uneasy, he said that he hated the spotlight. “Only politicians like to hear praise about themselves; only they love ponnadais and felicitations. I am not a politician. I am just an ordinary writer.”

Yet, he is no ordinary writer. He has been writing for 60 years. He has written both in English and Tamizh. And he has more than 65 titles to his credit. He is the go-to translator for every major publication and author – from Sudha Murthy to Devdutt Patnaik – who want to see their work in Tamizh.

In such an extra-ordinary Life, there are bound to have been lows. How did he handle them, I ask him. “Oh! There have been lows,” he confesses. One was when he lost his older brother to tubercolosis in 1961. And the other time was in 1997 when his younger brother passed away in a road accident. “I found it very difficult to deal with pain the first time. I suffered a lot. The second time too, I thought I could not handle it. I even considered quitting my job at Pfizer. But the then chairman of the company, S.V.Pillai, who was visiting my branch, sat down with me and asked me to immerse myself in my work to take my mind off the tragedy. That advice really helped me cope. It was through that catharsis that I learnt that Life must be faced; we must take Life as it comes.” At work too, over a career spanning four decades with one company, Charukesi has had to face tough circumstances. In one instance, one of his close colleagues protested when Charukesi was awarded a double increment in salary and promotion, for the third consecutive time. When the politicking got unbearable, Charukesi wrote to the management of Pfizer asking for his reward and promotion to be revoked. “I simply did not want someone’s actions and words to make me unhappy. I thought if this person would be happier if I did not get the raise, let me make him happy,” explains Charukesi. The management of Pfizer and his detractor were surprised with Charukesi’s rather unique response. But through some candid conversations the matter was settled, with the colleague realizing his mistake and the management insisting that Charukesi accept his just reward. “It was through this experience that I learnt the value of never allowing anyone or anything to ruin your happiness,” says Charukesi.

Spending time with Charukesi is like taking a crash course in humility. Here’s a man, a colossus, who towers over the bi-lingual writing scene in Tamil Nadu. Yet he is so unassuming. He wanted to know how Twitter works. And as we explained that to him, he listened intently, with a twinkle in his eyes, like the way a child would try to understand a new gizmo or hear a new story. He started writing as a hobby in 1956, for Kannan magazine from the Kalaimagal stable, and got paid a princely sum, then, of Rs.5/-. He still writes today but gives away his income from royalties to support causes from education to healthcare. “I don’t want to talk about my philosophy of giving. I do it because it makes Life better for someone, somewhere. It makes them happy,” says Charukesi brushing aside all suggestions that he’s benevolent.

We ask him for his advice to today’s generation – who seem to be leading very complicated and stressed out lives despite technology having made Life so simple: “Expectations for what-must-be are high and satisfaction for what-is is low. It must be the other way round. Then people will lead fuller, happier lives.”

As we say goodbye to Charukesi and head back home, I admire the simplicity of the man and the beauty of his being. Yet I can’t but help celebrate his father who taught his son the value of being happy and content early on in Life. A lesson, because it was well taken, has helped Charukesi be who he is today!