Cheat Sheet ( The forty-twenty conversation, re-visited).

It is said that as average humans we get about 60,000 thoughts each day. Like Dr. Wayne Dyer said, the problem is that they end up being the same 60,000 thoughts every day. The other problem is, 90% of these thoughts serve no purpose. They’re either pointless memories, baseless worries, headless fantasies or endless?judgments.

Occasionally it makes sense to step behind your thoughts to observe them.?And if necessary - confront them, audit them, or edit them. As you keep doing so, you realize that while your thoughts do not change day on day, they do change over a period of time as you grow older. Which means, the 60,000 thoughts you have had when you were thirty, might have turned into a completely different set of 60,000 thoughts by the time you’re forty.

Here are 35 of mine that have changed over time. A cheat sheet I wish I could have passed on to my younger self, had we met over a cup of?coffee someday.

1. I am finally convinced that I cannot change the world. And I feel strangely relieved.
2. Most humans have an altruistic spark inside. It surfaces?only?after?their immediate self-interest has been taken care of.
3. It is better to be at odds with the world & at peace with yourself, rather than the other way round. I think Nassim Taleb also said something like this in his book of aphorisms.
4. All family is not blood. All blood is not family.
5. Nostalgia in your forties – Plugging in to music from your twenties. The decade where all your music halts & gets archived. Too scattered to collect, yet too frozen to melt in a lifetime.
6. In the past you craved silence to drown the noise. Now you sometimes crave noise to drown the silence.
7. Humility is an inner scorecard & not an outer contest. Humility is not the same as false modesty. Humility is also not the opposite of healthy self-esteem.
8. Anton Syndrome, first described by Seneca in his Moral Letters, is the problem of being blind & refusing to accept it. Keep examining if you’re getting it. Do you really know what you don’t know?
9. If in a dilemma to choose between values, beliefs & opinions, go for values. They can’t fail you.
10. If in a dilemma to choose between being loved Vs being respected, go for being loved. Respect almost always perishes with time. Love sometimes survives.
11. Kafka got it wrong. In the end we’re all looking for a cage.
12. What most people call ‘work’, is a hiding place.
13. It’s when we’re drunk & not when we are sober that?we lie more convincingly.
14. If you want people to remember something, make it interesting rather than factual.
15. Often, it’s love that terrifies us, not guilt. Because guilt cannot survive in love. And that’s precisely what makes us feel so naked & scared.
16. Till mid-point you shouldn’t pass a day when you’ve not added a new thing to your mind. After mid-point, you shouldn’t pass a day without discarding an old thing from your mind.
17. The beginning & the end are always simple. It’s only the middles that get complicated. Reminds me, a middle ground need not always be in the middle. The best relationships are never 50:50 (but yeah - a 10:90 also won't fly).
18. Reality doesn’t need to consult your opinion.
19. Life mostly follows Plan B.
20. If you can sit still by a window without succumbing to distractions & watch raindrops fall on a silent city, you’re making progress.

21.??Life is not about liberating ourselves in selfishness or subjugating ourselves to a collective. Life is about interdependence. Each of us has a piece to complete in that larger canvas. We are all connected in the final analysis. We are one.

22. The best journeys aren’t where we reach one destination, but rather where we discover another.

23. If you remove every aimless element from your perfect life, you’ll end up with an imperfect life.

24. If, whenever it shows up in your memory, it evokes a sense of loss – it wasn’t love.

25. Growing older is making peace with the fact that you still have a heart full of blood & don’t quite know what to do with all it.

26. When you’re young, your confidence is your competence. When you’re older, your competence becomes your confidence.

27. If your love for life was your first rebellion, your indifference to death will be your last. Make both count.

28. When you’re younger?you look for strengths in people. As you grow older, you spot their weaknesses. Strengths define personalities. Weaknesses define character.

29. By half-time you’d have spent too much time with your myths to let go of them for a compromised reality. Your private mythology trumps truth and that’s?fine.?Eventually we all need to settle down in our concept of life rather than in life itself.

30. Only when you yourself grow older do you realize why those older people used to be grumpy all the time. When you’re young, your life is all about?Can-Dos?and?Will-Be?s. As years slip off the calendar, it becomes all about?Could-Haves?and?Should-Haves.

31. If, in the last one year, you can’t remember even once when you reached your parking lot but didn’t switch off your ignition simply because you wanted to wait for a certain song to end, you’ve started to die a little. (Reminds me – being?child-like?is not the same as being?childish.)

32. Ignorance doesn’t always trip you. Overconfidence almost always does.

33. At least once in your life the?You?who you became will come face to face with the?You?who you could have become.

34. The tragedy of some stories is that they end too soon. The tragedy of other stories is that they start too late.

35. On stories, again -?Every life has several stories. First, the story as it was. Second, the story as it could have been. Third, the story as it was told. Fourth, the story as it would go ahead to be remembered.

Live fair. Finish well.

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( This is an excerpt from a chapter in my 2021 book, 'Life-ing it'. That & my other two books, 'As you life it' and 'Once upon a someone', are available on Amazon in your country).