MAY 2021 IS WHEN YOU DISCOVER EXPERIENTIAL LIVING

How do you deal with a crisis? Or some daunting event you haven’t faced yet?

How do you face challenges in life or at work, especially when you are not prepared?

I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no formula or magic potion that you can just gulp down and get through a crisis. If anything, it’s a process. It’s a mindset that you need to work on continually.

A great leader once said, “In times of peace, prepare for war.” In other words, you must prepare for a challenge much before it has arrived.

In doing this, you are keeping yourself open to new situations, untested ideas and unknown challenges. That’s what I call Experiential Living!

When you are in constant pursuit of a new way of life, challenging situations will present themself more often. In the process, you’ll prepare yourself to face them too. Even in the face of challenges like Covid or Demonetization or any other form of business or personal disruptions, you will find yourself much calmer and in command of yourself.

But it’s not something you do once a while. It must become a way of life. Life has a way of throwing up unseen challenges at us, more so in current times.

But when you start to live an experiential life, you welcome challenges with open arms. It helps me live a fuller life and deal with any crisis situation better.

In Jan 2021 I visited Goa with my wife and daughters. It was meant to be a lazy stay for about 15 days. But we started taking a lot of new tours, like going to a forest area, taking up short hikes, navigating through the water canals etc. We tried to take in all the local experiences; all the things we hadn’t done before. During one such exploration, we came across a place where people were cliff jumping.

Cliff jumping is exactly what the term says – jumping from an elevated cliff into a catchment area of water, like a small pond or a lake.

We had no plans of doing this cliff jump. But somehow, I felt I could pull it off. From a distance the cliff didn’t seem too high. If others can do it why not me, I thought.

I am not much a swimmer, so there was a dormant fear. But I decided to go for it anyway.

My tour guide and I climbed up the cliff, which needed us to cling on to roots of trees and pull ourselves to the top. By the way, you cannot come down from the same route as you got up. The only way to get down is by jumping into the water.

On my way up I was very excited. We soon reached the spot from where I needed to jump. But once I stood on that point, I was frozen.

All of a sudden, the fear of jumping had taken over me. I started counting all my regrets – Why did I come here? Why did I want to be a hero? I was so cosy sitting where I was, damn it! For over 15 mins I just stood there, frozen.

There was this fear, staring right at me. What if somethings goes wrong, or something happens to me?

But then there was also this part of my brain saying if others can do it why not me? Just take one step.

Apart from the fear, there also stood my two young daughters who were watching me. What will they think? As a father you want to set the right example for your kids. You want them to live an experiential life and take up challenges. So, I didn’t want to go back to them defeated.

Then the instructor called out – “Just don’t look down. Make sure your feet go first and you don’t hit the water face first.”

That was my cue. The next moment, I just let it go. The fraction of the last second after I left the cliff, I said to myself – There goes the land below my feet. Gone! I was in the air now.

And then, I was in the water. It was the most thrilling few seconds I’ve had in a long time.

I was super proud of myself. It may seem a small thing, but this was the first time I did something like this. But as I came swimming to the shore, for some reason, I felt I should do it again. So, I did it again. This time of course, I could anticipate things better.

What it taught me?

If we have to face a challenge, we have to first learn to let go of fear. But this is not a skill you can develop in the moment of crisis. The answer to this is an experiential lifestyle – when you keep challenging your limits in small but important ways, pushing past your comforts and your mental limitations, you build resilience towards fear.

In Covid times, I find there is no better skill as this. To move forward as humanity, we will first have to move past our fears.