Eight tweaks that helped me reclaim my life..

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an org**m!”

That’s your inimitable Woody Allen.

In this life but, there’s no such hope. Growing older might seem like a medical anomaly when you’re 25 &?an unsubstantiated rumor when you’re 35, it surely becomes a distinct possibility when you’re 45.

Like most Type As, my growing up years were pretty busy & stressed. By virtue of some monstrous optimism in me, I had this belief in a corner of my small-town heart that I was meant to become something great. The problem was, I was never specific with my definition of?greatness??! Hence, I would be forever caught up in races, either by design or by default, measuring myself against ever new adversaries & getting terribly hassled if someone else was getting the better grades, dating the prettier girl or wearing the shinier medal.

Then, like everyone else, life happened. Little by little, I learnt to let go of possibilities, to tame my hope & to shed my audacity. With a smile.

I still remember the day distinctly when I realized I won’t win a Booker, become the chairman of GE,?bring home an Olympic medal or get a call from Stockholm in this lifetime. It was a Sunday. And I was remarkably calm. Considering I was bidding goodbye to the me I thought myself to be. And to all those innocent dreams.

Except for a handful among us, we all hit this reset point someday – the day you recalibrate yourself, redo your priorities & step into your second innings. The fun thing is, once you let go of some of your impossible aspirations, you discover you have so much scope left to do what’s possible.

The other day someone asked me how I manage my time. It was while responding to him that I realized how different my days look today than what they did a decade back. Of course, I am neither some high achieving role model nor a Guru who has profound life-altering lessons to offer. But I have worked out what works for me.?Today, I no longer long to be the fastest rat or the most argumentative scholar in the room. I’ve made friends with the man in the mirror.?I carve my timeouts. I smile. I breathe. I live.

Here are the top eight areas I consciously tweaked in my?‘lean years’?and which have made me calmer & also content in being a best firsthand me rather than a second best second hand someone else.

1. The World?– Is complex. There’s a lot happening out there. 24x7. Our brain reacts aggressively to sensationalist, loud, black & white information, often confusing opinions with knowledge. I have realized over the years that 99% of News is sponsored agenda & largely irrelevant to my life. I’ve lived long enough to have understood that there is nothing permanent or important in all that noise out there. So, I stay away from the News as much as possible. If I need to, I read researched & neutral articles. Or I prefer to stay ignorant about trending current affairs. Curiously, this saves me a lot of time for other important things in life. And also, from the heartburn that’s caused by the constant need to prove others wrong & myself right. And here’s the rub. I have seen that if there’s something important to be known, it somehow makes its way to me. So far so good!
2. The Society?– Has changed. The digital supernova that hit us in this century has made geographical distances irrelevant. Yet, despite all the super connectivity, we’ve all become lonely, together.?Sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true. From first-hand experience I realized that social media didn’t add any value to my life. The day I deleted my Facebook account, 850 of my 1000 'friends'?vanished. The remaining 150 were in my life even before social media came along. There’s some truth in the Dunbar’s number thing after all. (Thankfully I had never done Twitter). Letting go of all that shallow chatter & self-aggrandization, I have unlocked a lot of residual space in my heart for real relationships. I make lot of genuine friends these days. More importantly, I try to?be?a genuine friend for them too. Instead of a mere cheerleader clicking a convenient digital handle & not meaning anything.
3. The Phone?– Has taken us hostage. It not only contains our work & our entertainment in it, but it has also become powerful enough to influence our world view, thanks to all communities it can enlist you in. If you know me personally, you might know my strict policy regarding ‘Groups’. When I share my phone number with people, I politely request them to not add me to any community. I am not part of any online community or email chains. I neither receive nor send forwarded messages and I promptly remove any source that tries to suck me into any such activity. To the extent possible, I have not derated my vocabulary to the digitized communication style of the phone – those exaggerated emoticons, those half-spelt words, that over-done empathy and all those unnecessary acronyms. To borrow Cal Newport’s phrase, I am a ‘digital minimalist’?and my phone doesn’t have any App that is not necessary for my daily functioning.
4. The Money Matters?– Are where I am Gold Standard Stupid. For years, I have spent sleepless nights worrying about money and how to overcome my lack of understanding it. In the end, I adopted what suited my acumen & gave me peace of mind. I don’t have any loans on me. I even bought my car by paying upfront. I have only one credit card & it’s linked to my only bank account with a monthly auto-debit instruction. I have two modest life insurance policies and whatever little savings I have, are in Fixed Deposits that yield a criminally low rate of return. But I also understand that finances are not my strong point & I do not want to blow off my hard-earned salary in the stock market that I have no clue of. Some friends call me dumb. And I am fine with being dumb here.
5. The Righteousness Call?– is what I call 'the?Uncle-ji-syndrome'. In the amplified world of today, it takes less time to deflect attention than?to grab it. The digital age has made us all hackable. Even when we claim to have a free will. Especially when we claim to have a free will. Then there’s this aggressive populism?against?the populist regimes the world over which are often instantaneous and (sometimes) rudderless, resulting in the fizzling out of rebellions around main issues. As armchair theorists keep slugging out on non-issues flung on them in TV debates and Twitter wars, I’ve let go of my false notions that I can change the world. I’ve stopped taking sides & having strong opinions. I have no political stand & I have traded my religious views for?(private) spiritual ones. If I have the urge to bring about a change, I stick to my circle of influence & I do it quietly without broadcasting it. There’s a strange calm in living inside a storm but refusing to participate in it.
6. The Limits?–And the limitations. While destiny sets limits to where you can reach, there need not be limits on how you choose to test yourself. Most people living in our condominium assume that I am a gym instructor, given the fact that that’s the only common area in the premises where they mostly see me ??. For someone on the wrong side of his 40s,?I obviously know what I can change & what I cannot. So, while I cannot change my genetics, I can but challenge my body to its limits. For someone who loves eating everything & drinking regularly (bad example – don’t follow this, kids), I know I need to make fitness a top priority. For me, punishing my body to its endurance boundaries is a form of meditation that clears my mind & keeps it off distractions. And obviously, the packs look great in the bathroom mirror.
7. The Legacy Issue?– Is the Maslow thing. After an age we all get bitten by this self-actualization bug, whether we possess the bandwidth to do something about it or not. If my younger years were all about wanting to do a lot but doing nothing substantial in real, these days I try to do little and end up exceeding what I set out to do. I try to help one person (only one) every single day in some way. I respond to people who reach out to me & I try to support within my means (of course there are so many whom I try to help & fail, but I’m good with that). And lastly (this is embarrassing???), I also actively mentor a diverse group of professionals, both young & old, trying to get them from Point A to Point B by sharing my life experiences. Nothing great, but all this has helped me build a huge network of friends & well-wishers. And I sleep well at night.
8. The Grid?– Is what traps us. Every now & then I take myself off the grid. These are chunks of time, 4-5 days long, when I drop off the radar & practice deliberate inactivity. This is where I do my other kind of reading & writing. Like most compulsive bloggers, my normal reading & writing consists of things that make me feel & look clever. There’s this normal human craving in there for applause which in turn inspires me to carry on learning & producing something new every day. But when I periodically vanish into my private space, I read for myself. I re-read my favorite portions of my favorite classics without the burning desire to retain anything. And I write for myself. These are my most personal scribbles, my notes to myself. These are my journal entries, my un-posted poems & a documentation of my rise & fall as a human being in a never-ending duel between my virtues & vices. Over the years, this ritual has helped me grow & also made me level-headed about external validation. I am grateful when it’s there. I am graceful when it isn’t.

So, unlike what Mr. Allen suggests, clocks & calendars are unfortunately unidirectional devices. But yes, with conscious conditioning, we can all try to?scatter, distort, rearrange?them as best as we can?so that we can step off the treadmill to make time for time itself. And watch life flow.

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(Thanks for reading. Do hit 'Like' & leave a comment if this article connected with you. This is a chapter from my 2021 book, 'Life-ing it'. You can find it and my other two books, 'As You Life It' & 'Once upon a someone' on Amazon in your country)

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