This New Year, throw out all resolutions! Choose “awareness” instead!!!

Be spontaneous. Let Life happen and you flow through it, with it. This is the only secret to living a full Life!

As another year winds down to an end, many on the social networks are assessing the year gone by – recording its highs and lows, basically analyzing and dissecting the past – and  are also drawing up resolutions, hoping to make the coming year memorable. In my humble opinion, neither analysis nor resolution can make your year – or Life – more memorable than it will be.

Resolutions indicate that you are going to restrict what happens to you to a few choices. Let’s say one of your goals is to lose weight – for which you resolve to work out daily. Now, if you cannot work out for a whole week, for whatever reason, you will feel miserable about your resolution, about yourself and your incapability to lose weight. Given your knowledge of your Life and lifestyle, a point worth considering is, why restrain yourself with a difficult choice that you are unlikely to sustain? Anything that you restrain, anything that you try to control, or resist, will bring you misery.

This does not mean that you must not have a vision for yourself or that you must not set a goal. But don’t hold a gun to yourself. Don’t impose conditions. Instead, flow with Life. Choose to be in the now, to be aware. As your awareness increases, your ability to create new opportunities or seize opportunities, in the direction of your goals or vision, enhances.

Let’s go back to the weight loss example. You have a resolution to spend an hour at the gym daily working out, or walking for an hour. Now, you haven’t done this all your Life. Or you have been erratic going to the gym in the past. The New Year comes and goes. You are still are struggling to hit the gym. Work pressure, travel, matters at home and social engagements continue to keep you occupied. Soon, the ghost of your resolution comes to haunt you – especially because you have already enrolled at the gym but have not showed up there ever. And so misery sets in. Instead of things being this way, consider how would it have been had you been open to each day’s schedules, allowing yourself to go with the flow, and yet creating time for physical exercise or activity. This could be at the gym or it could be a swim or a walk in the park. Whatever. The key is get your body to exercise at a convenient time slot that is in sync with your schedule. This is what going with the flow means. As you continue to exercise physically, your body too responds beautifully and within a few weeks you have fallen into a rhythm. Well, surely, you have not lost any sleep over scheduling physical activity in your daily calendar. Besides, there’s no misery. You are going with the flow of Life – aware and happy!

Awareness is a beautiful tool to employ in your Life. You don’t have to do anything to activate it. Just let go of all conditions and restrictions. Don’t resolve. Don’t decide a particular way. Visualize an outcome and just flow through Life each day and make choices that are connected to your vision or goals. A principal reason why most New Year (and birthday or anniversary) resolutions fail is because they are force-fitted by you into your Life. You are making them to console yourself. You are making them under pressure and not quite out of happiness. Make sure you are happy when making any choice. If not, re-examine your choices. Find ways to tweak your choices to allow you to be happy. More happiness leads to more awareness. More awareness leads to more responsible choices. With awareness, more gets done without any misery, without any agony, spontaneously.

Just keep walking, the path will always unfold on its own!

Sometimes, it is best not to get what you want in Life. Because when you review the reasons why you did not get what you wanted, you will really find what is truly ordained for you.

Life is inscrutable. The path you choose may not always be available to you. But a closed door or a dead end will, ALWAYS, often miraculously, open up a whole new path for you. You may trudge on it reluctantly to arrive at an unknown place, only to discover that you really, truly belong there!

This is so bizarre at one level. You are encouraged to set a Vision for yourself, have goals and diligently pursue them. Yet you are now being told that despite what you have planned, Life will take you on its own course! Well, it may seem incredible, but it is the way it is. At another level, it is so simple and easy. You can only make a Life out of what happens to you __ irrespective of what you planned or wanted. That’s really the only way to bliss!

16-and-a-half years ago, in 1996, after three successive disastrous employment stints, I presented myself in the office of a high-profile recruiter in Chennai. He subsequently built his company up well and sold it recently to a global recruitment firm. But back then, the recruiter was a big name, and his firm was still a start-up. I had known him through my years as a business journalist. So, I sought his help in getting me a good, well-paying, purposeful corporate job. He spent three hours speaking with me and assured me of a quick turnaround. Post that meeting, over the next three months, I must have called him a few dozen times. Email was not so big then. So, one had to follow up only via phone. He neither answered my calls nor he did return even one of them. It was bizarre. I remember agonizing then: at least he could tell me why he was not successful in pushing my case with employers?

Frustrated, and perhaps also driven by the fact that I had been ‘rejected’, I resolved that I should perhaps go on to be an employer. And not be an employee anymore. One fine day, in August 1996, I went ahead and set up a tiny consulting Firm with my wife! We were moderately successful financially in our early years. But by the end of our first decade in business, we were staring at a big, dark,  black  hole of accumulated losses and an unimaginable pile of debt. Eventually, we went bankrupt and, in many ways, continue to be in that state.

Initially, I hated where we had ended up finding ourselves: presiding over the debris of a debt-laden, problem-ridden firm. I used to hate that feeling__of guilt, ignominy, hopelessness, fear and resentment__ which would gnaw at me from within in each waking moment. But now, after all these years, when I look back, I find that without the rejection I faced in the job market, I may not have embraced entrepreneurship and without having failed at entrepreneurship, I may never have understood what Life is, what intelligent living is and understood what contentment is as I do now!

When I introspect, I am grateful for the experiences I have been through that have transformed me from being an angry, foul-mouthed, obsessive, possessive, egotist to being a simple, accepting, mindful voyager through Life. My learnings from the path that I did not choose, but which unfolded itself in front of me as I walked, have brought me to, I earnestly believe, my Life’s purpose: to awaken people to the right way of thinking, living, working and winning! I am reminded of what John Bunyan, a 17^th Century English writer and preacher, had to say: “Although I have been through all that I have, I do not regret the many hardships I met, because it was they who brought me to the place I wished to reach.”  

So celebrate Life’s inscrutability. Don’t grieve, don’t mourn over what you wanted and did not get. Keep walking, knowing that the path will always unfold, and always take you to where you must eventually arrive and truly belong!