This lifetime is a limited period offer

Value the opportunity in (and of) this lifetime. There may not be another as far as we know it!

        

I met someone recently who said that while he valued being an Indian, he valued owning an American passport more. He said, “With an American passport you can travel to most places in the world. With an Indian passport, you have to keep seeking visas to enter many countries.”

I don’t disagree with his logic. Of course he has a point. But I guess to be born human is the biggest opportunity that we often fail to recognize, let alone value. This human Life is the most valuable passport we can ever ask for. Wayne Dyer, one of the most profound thinkers of our time, passed away last week at 75. I have learned a lot from him and have benefited immensely from imbibing his philosophy. He often used to say: “Stop acting as if Life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.”   

Think about this deeply. We have all been created, we are born, without our asking. For all we care, we may well have been created as the swine that gives the flu than be created as the human that gets the flu from the swine. So, to be human, to be alive and to be able to read this post means a lot. It means that you are more blessed than several million other people on the planet – who don’t have vision, education, literacy, a computer or access to internet. Your lifetime is a limited period offer. Value it, avail of it, use it, live it fully while it lasts.

Junk the curse and conspiracy theory – celebrate Life’s magic and beauty!

None of us is cursed. If we count our blessings, no matter what we are facing, Life will be magical and beautiful.

        

A friend wrote to me, in a bout of depression perhaps, that he felt his Life was cursed – he was faced with a lot of hurdles in his business and career. He was hopeful though that eventually things will work out for him. “But it is the waiting that chews you up! That’s when I feel cursed and let down by Life,” he lamented.

I have felt like him before. But over years of waiting, like him, and quite like many of us do, for Life to deliver what I have envisioned, I have learnt that being impatient with Life is of no use. Life is not conspiring to fix you or me. None of us is cursed. Things just happen. Things just are the way they ought to be. It is our wanting our Life to be different from what it is that causes us to imagine that there’s a conspiracy, that we are cursed – this wanting is the root cause of all our suffering too. The best way to respond to Life is to just go with the flow. Drop all expectations. Don’t react to Life. Respond to it with acceptance. This does not mean inaction. This means learning to act with what is than demanding that the situation, the circumstance, the context be different.

Osho, the Master, explains this so beautifully: “Life is a curse if you are not aware.” The awareness he is referring to is about the true nature of Life. Which is that there is no Life any of us has other than what is happening to us in the now, in the moment. It is because we are imprisoned by the past – by guilt, grief and anger over what has happened – or by the future – by worry, anxiety and fear over what we imagine may happen to us – that we miss living in the present moment. When we are living this way we are physically present but we are not aware of nor are we in the moment.

A man was sitting on the beach brooding over his Life – his wife had deserted him and he had lost his job. It was about 4 am in the morning. Morning joggers filled the beach. Soon children, who were vacationing in summer, started to arrive. By 5.30 am, there was lot of activity. Laughter and joyful screams rent the air. But the man was nonplussed – he kept staring blankly at the horizon. He looked lost, sad and beaten. A jogger paused by him to admire the sunrise – it was a magnificent sunrise, a spectacle to behold. The jogger took a deep breath and, to share the moment with the brooding man, more out of courtesy, than with an intention to intrude, exclaimed: “Amazing sunrise, eh?” The man was shaken out of his stupor. He sounded irritable as he barked at the jogger: “What sunrise? Just leave me alone, will you?” Most of us are like that brooding man. And because we constantly keep finding reasons to bark at Life (the jogger’s but a metaphor), we miss its magic and beauty.

To deal with and overcome this mind-made theory of curse and conspiracy, just follow Osho’s prescription – be more aware. Stop and smell the roses, pause and cherish each sunrise and sunset, celebrate the waxing and waning of the moon, and feel the raindrops on your face. Each dinner that you miss with the family, remember, is an opportunity of a lifetime lost. There’s so much that Life’s offering on its menu for you. You will see and experience all of it, only if you are there. Hello, where are you?

Stay with the truth, sleep well, stay blessed!

In any situation, stay with the truth.

In a workshop session I led yesterday, a young manager asked me if speaking the truth was worth it at all. He said, “I feel most comfortable saying things as they are. I prefer being in-the-face. But I am soon discovering that people don’t like it. I am losing friends and relationships.”

The manager raises an interesting question. We too have been told, or have sometimes experienced, that staying with the truth can be a competitive disadvantage. Sometimes, we wonder if speaking our mind will make others uncomfortable or even hurt them. We desist from speaking the truth also because we want to cover-up. But let me tell you, from my experience, that truth is a liberator. It is a healer. It is a very deadly weapon, a brahmastra, in our arsenal. I believe we fight shy of using it because we are worried about becoming vulnerable in this ‘big, bad, cold and merciless’ world.

Fundamentally, our world view has to change. The world is not made up of hypocrites, cynics, facists, rapists and terrorists alone. They are but a small population from all of humanity. Just like shadows in the dark are amplified by our fears, so are the deeds of a few men and women in the darkness of our minds and hearts. Arise and awaken to the glorious sunshine of the rest of humanity. Making yourself vulnerable by clinging on to the truth, irrespective of the circumstance, alone will fetch you the love, compassion and warmth of like-minded people around you. If someone deserts you because you spoke the truth, then they really were not worth being in your Life. Period. Besides, when you stay with the truth you don’t have to remember what you said! Most importantly, having embraced the truth, you will sleep well. When you can sleep in peace, you are truly blessed. Nothing else, believe me, matters! 

A Gift and a Blessing

Life is an eternal blessing, an endless course of abundance. We are not seeing this always because we are steeped in scarcity thinking!

Focusing on what we don’t have comes naturally to all of us. But for each thing that we don’t have or for each dimension of our Life where there’s something scarce, there’s a blessing, another aspect that’s soaked in abundance. For every dark cloud that hangs over us, there is the proverbial silver lining. To find it, we must just let go of our grief over what has happened and of what we don’t have, and simply survey what we have left with us. When we let go and learn to live with what we have we will immediately experience inner peace.

Some months ago, I had to sell my car. It was old and was breaking down far too frequently. There wasn’t money to either fix it or replace it with another car. We simply had to let it go. It was a difficult decision, having had a car for over 25 years, for as long as I have been independent and married. The question that confronted me – and my wife – was how would our daughter manage. She had never used public transport before. Not that she was spoilt by luxury. Hardly. But there had miraculously never been a need for her to take a bus or auto-rickshaw ever – to school or to her social outings or to college. We called her and updated her of our hard decision and predicament. We advised her to use autos for transport. To our surprise, she declined. She said she understood the situation we are in and so wanted to use train and bus for her commute. We tried explaining to her that since we was not used to either mode, she may find it difficult to cope with the crowds at rush hour. But she insisted that she wanted to give it a shot. We agreed that she would try for two weeks at which point we would review. In exactly a fortnight our daughter came back to declare that she was “comfortable and was settling in” with her new reality. She said it so simply, so responsibly and so convincingly that we did not feel like countering her with our parental anxiety and reasoning.

It was a beautiful moment of awakening and discovery for me personally. Here I was grappling with what I didn’t have – a car, and so was steeped in scarcity thinking, wondering how a child who had never ever used public transport would cope. And here was Life that had blessed me and my wife with such a wonderful daughter who not only had the maturity to accept our current reality – in which anything material, even a basic taken-for-granted gadget, device, instrument, machine or asset, is a luxury – but also had the sense of adventure to plunge head-on into an environment she was not familiar with. I don’t share this by way of self-congratulation or to praise my child, but I share to tell you how beautiful Life’s ways are. Our daughter (and son) fills our Life with abundance – this blessing far outweighs what we don’t have and what, perhaps, no longer matters!

Indeed. There’s so much abundance in us and around us. And not all of it is material or linked to money or to what money can buy. Most of it, in fact, can make us happier even if we didn’t have money or things with us. Someone I know, Madhuri Velegar, who used to write for Femina magazine from Bangalore, died of cancer a couple of days ago. A friend pulled out what she had written sometime back (on how she felt in her last days) and posted it on facebook: “…I got drawn into meditation. Almost daily I stared long at the Gulmohar tree and its flowers outside my house. I waited for sunsets, I sat under the morning sun, I worshipped the rain…” That’s the abundance that I am talking of.

Our lives are abundant too. Our sunrises and sunsets, the rains, the flowers, the birds, the love and warmth of our children and the companionship of our soul-mates, all these are available to us and are waiting to soak us in abundance. Provided, of course, we stop complaining about what we don’t have and instead celebrate what we have! When we do that we too will realize what a wonderful gift Life is and what a blessing it is to be alive!

When's your bougainvillea moment going to be?

In reality, Life is pretty simple. And there’s beauty in its every moment. 

 

 

However we make it complex by worrying, fearing, grieving and rushing through it __ so we miss the magic in each moment!

 

 

They blushed at me from across the street

Pause. Close your eyes. And feel your breathing. Feel your heart beat. Hear the clock tick. Get up, walk over to your balcony and look out on to the street. Wait for a while and identify the most beautiful thing you see. I just did that. And I saw a burst of bougainvillea blushing at me from across the street. It’s a huge affair. But I had never noticed it until this morning. I am grateful I did. Because it made me come alive.

 

 

We often take many things for granted. Yesterday, my daughter suffered a ligament tear in her left foot, landing badly after attempting a mid-air split during her dance rehearsals. She’s out of action for at least a week and off dancing, which is her Life, for over four weeks. As she limped around, writhing in pain, I realized how ungrateful we are to our feet. Our cars receive more attention than our feet who have been with us longer and continue to serve us without protest, carrying our entire weight!

 

 

The way we behave, and the way we distribute our attention, is so unfair. For every problem we face, we have perhaps a 100 other reasons to celebrate. But our problems receive our biggest attention. Somehow, the fickle human mind loves misery. So, we celebrate our sorrows. Always thinking about what isn’t and feeling woeful about Life. Lamenting is convenient. It requires no effort. The mind can and will go on and on and on telling you that you don’t have this or that. Grief, to us, comes naturally!

Being happy, on the other hand, is hard work. You have to labor to take your mind off fearing and worrying to be happy. It is not that being sad is bad. When things don’t go your way, you will feel sad. But to berate yourself and live in a perpetually sorrowful state is sacrilege. That’s really when gratitude can help. When you are thankful for what you have, what you don’t have loses its relevance. Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), the man who played Superman, before he became a quadriplegic in 1995, after which he was consigned to a wheelchair and had to have a breathing apparatus, had this to say: “Some people are walking around with full use of their bodies and they're more paralyzed than I am.”

Indeed. We are paralyzed by our insecurities, desires and anxieties. As American author Cynthia Ozick says, “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.” If only we spent a little time each day, to connect with Life, like my bougainvillea moment of this morning, we will see how simple, and how beautiful, Life really is. So, when’s your bougainvillea moment going to be?