Wrap! 23 reflections from 2023.

So here we are. 2023 is done and dusted .?Archived and available for reconstruction & deconstruction in retrospect ?. In broad strokes – in bygone joys, fleeting regrets, unexplained melancholy & struck-off names in the telephone book . In sights and sounds and smells contained in rehearsed memories & memories of those memories. Our life bytes , some closely held, others slipping off into misty moors where the postman never goes.

For the past many years, this is the time when I step back & audit the year that’s gone by. This is when I ?occasionally take myself off the calendar, where I slow myself down and practice deliberate inactivity to find my silences . This helps me unwind and gives me perspective. Life, as we discover, is not a linear road we follow, but rather,?is a series of spaces we inhabit. Where we go in, where we wander awhile and eventually move to the next. Where we temporarily draw out our corridors and discover our windows. Then, when we look back at our earlier spaces, we ?discover new things added. And others missing. Like a habitat that adapts to nature & builds itself over time, not just to shelter us & preserve us, but also to document our stories. Our tribe, our loves, our victories and our losses.

Here are some thoughts of mine from 2023. Some random musings of a traveler who’s now stopped at an inn & who has, for a change, requested a time-out from life.

• All family is not blood. All blood is not family.
• Happiness is a cause, not an effect. Start with happiness & you’ll find the cause. All our life, we’ve been doing it the other way round.
• The way out of a rut starts somewhere external to the rut, a place totally unrelated to the rut itself.
• Trust succeeds an event. Faith needs to precede an event. Mere hope, however, is neither trust nor faith. It’s just pessimism trying to disguise itself as optimism.
• In any undesirable situation, you have only 3 choices – Change it if you can. Move away from it if you can’t. Or, simply accept it.
• Abstinence from something can be a good first step. It should not become the primary act in itself.
• Examine if your prayers are fears in disguise. Daily.
• Knowledge by itself is of no use. Yes, intellectual assimilation of knowledge is necessary for instantaneous retrieval of wisdom when you’re ready for it.
• People need a word of encouragement under two circumstances – One, when they are doing well. And two, when they are not doing well.
• Incentivizing micro-accountability sometimes kills macro objectives.
• When someone needs help, don’t judge. Just help. When you need help, don’t be ashamed. Just ask. People who say they’re too proud to ask for help, are? the ones who are never available to help others as well ( 2023 was a year when I reached out to people for help. So many people from unexpected quarters came forward that I totally missed noticing the ones who didn’t).
• You’re never ‘done’ & always are work-in-progress. That’s how it works.
• Your will power is a muscle. Training it to failure too often can be counter-productive as you’ll have none left when you need to cope with out-of-routine challenges. Spend it wisely.
• There are two groups of people in your life. One, whom you cling to with a fierce mutual vulnerability & the other who you believe will always be around, as part of the background scenery. It will be the second group who will leave a bigger vacuum when they’re gone.
• Never judge a Teacher. Every Teacher is a connector with a role in your journey as you grow in life, someone who clarifies the discordant notes in you at that point & gently leads you by the hand in a unique? way to harmony of the next milestone -? a way that, at that moment, is the right way for your faculties to absorb.
• Routines are great. Till they’re not. Routines can gradually get us stuck in some ‘here’ & we then fail to figure out how to go from that ‘here’ to the next ‘there’. It occasionally makes sense to break a routine, to toss our days & re-do our hours. Even embrace a ‘no-calendar, no-agenda day’ once a week. To take a new route to work, with new music from the stereo & looking forward to a new author’s book by the bedside.
• Goals are great, till they stop being so. In life, it sometimes makes sense to hit pause button & apply a speed-velocity test on ourselves. Are we merely running or are we running towards something worthwhile. If not, no hassles. We can always stop & pivot. At the end of the day, being merely the fastest rat is not a worthy goal.
• Everyone you see out there, is carrying a private inside story within them. A small, lovely poem that started nicely but didn’t quite end. A melodious song whose notes gave up midway because no one was listening.
• Life can only do to you what it can do through you.
• It won’t happen in the way you’re imagining that it would.
• Your life story will be the net of the history of your fears & the audacity of your faith. And then, there will come a year in your life when you’ll let go of your life story & allow it to drift into the corner of the blue sky, like a string of balloons released from captivity.
• One day when you’re all alone & sorted, reach for an old photo album & see your parents with their peers in their black & white youth, when they had all those impossible dreams sparkling in their eyes & all the rebellion burning in their hearts. Something suddenly will cloud your heart. Like getting off the bus & realizing that the carnival has ended & the solitary clown is packing up, peeling off his own face in the mirror.

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(Ayon’s Blog? . Please feel free to leave comments)

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