Are we there yet ?

There is a book that comes to my mind again and again at odd moments. It is not a philosophical book or a religious book. Nor is it a tome filled with nuggets of wisdom. Not a biography or a memoir. Strangely, it is an early reader book that spans about 10 pages with about as many lines.  It is a book I had to read a zillion times to my child.

The book is titled "Are we there yet ?" and it reminds me of the journey of life; chasing the answer to that same eternal question. 

In the book Mickey and his group want to go to the Sandy Beach which is just a mile away. They miss the road to the beach and instead go the other way .. and the journey begins ...

Sandy Beach 1 mile, Dry Desert - 10 miles.

Then the question -

Are we there yet ? No ! This is not the beach ! :) 

And they go on ...
Sandy Beach 11 miles, Rain Forest - 100 miles...
Sandy Beach 111 miles, Antarctica - 1000 miles...
All the way to back to -
Sandy Beach 1 mile, Dry Desert - 10 miles .......
where they take the correct turn and end up at the beach they wanted to go in the first place.

At every stage there is a route back to the Sandy Beach and they consistently miss this turn.

To me the entire 10 page book is an allegory of life. The Sandy Beach is the ultimate enlightenment and the other stops are whatever we crave in life - status, money, fame, possessions, power. Basically any state that doesn't give a sense of lasting peace or a permanent "Yes" to the question "Are we there yet ?" or "Have I arrived ?" (To word it differently).

It seems a little naive and perhaps subtly condescending to say - status, money, fame, possessions, power are not the ultimate goals. But generally speaking; is there is a threshold when we say we have enough money? Or we have enough material possessions? There is always something more to buy, there is always more money to earn, more places to see, more power to wield, more followers to get, more more more ........ It is a never ending quest. No, at least I do not consider it the ultimate destination.

The ultimate destination or nirvana if you will; does not mean an end to experiences nor is it the end of pursuit. It does mean that what you achieve and the joy of achievement is independent of the need for validation - be it internal or external.

It is like enjoying the beach for its own sake - rather than racing through the experience to put up a selfie/picture to show you are enjoying. The act of sharing the picture itself is trivial. However there is a difference in putting up a picture to share your happiness with your friends vs putting up a picture to show you are enjoying.

And so - when I look at life - I know my answer to that question is:  "No - This is not the beach". I am still journeying (or lost ? ) ...... and that question still haunts me.

Pace of Life .... :)

I read this great article by Nandu - Pace of life and this blog is in response to some of the queries he has posted there. ( My answers turned out to be too long !!! )

The main topic .. is pace of life and how we seem to be rats in a spin wheel. Not a new topic ... but .. :))

The psychological/medical explanation of why we are addicted to searching, tweeting etc is given in this article . For those of you who have a short attention span - this is a long read but you can directly read the first para and last 3 paras to get the gist !!

First I must say I don't believe in balanced life. :)) I don't believe any generation ever really had it. We might think looking from a perspective of 15-20 yrs that they were happy - but they faced their own challenges. Plus we were kids !! :) It may make more sense to see what the adults were doing.

If we see; our parents spent a lot of time in physical work ... I don't remember a time when my mom / grand mom really goofed off. May be only when they visited their maternal homes !! :) My grand mom would do patchwork quilts when she was free ... !!!! Otherwise she was cooking, working in the fields, winnowing, running behind us kids , making butter, tidying the house etc etc etc. No cleaned rice, wheat , ready made butter etc off the shelves for her !!! My granddad was busy in the fields or with his photography .... He was engaged most of the day .. and night time was good for his photography work ..... Similar story for my Mom and Dad - Mom worked too ...

Yes the pace of life was slower I think - but then that generation had its own stresses to cope with.

Now for us a quite a few our stresses are self-inflicted. This is not to say that there is no compulsion to be better, faster and more efficient on a daily basis. It is there ... and I don't see it getting less any time in the near future. What we can do is instead is stream-line the areas that we have to focus on and eliminate the chaff.

Here are few of my observations -

First I think - we should forget the 5 day week and 2 day weekend concept. It is a 7 day work / weekend. That means pockets of leisure have to be taken during the week itself. You may think - Not during the working hours ... but I knew people who would go for a jog in the afternoon which worked as a stress buster and helped them get their exercise. It also made them come back to work with a fresh mind !!! Some would go to their patch gardens near the office - to do half an hour of weed pulling !

We have to choose what our stress buster is - be it 2 min meditation, slow deep breathing, going to a comics website , reading a few inspirational thoughts, watching a movie , a walk in nature etc ... It is a fact that there is no longer a clean divide between work and leisure time.

Secondly I think it is easy to get lost in the thick of thin things. ( Borrowing from Stephen Covey's - First things First ). How many times have we found that just googling on one topic leads to another and then another and you have ended up spending 3 hours ... almost doing nothing ? Personally I can be online all day and all night ... and still feel that I can continue ! :)

Yes technologies are addictive no doubt but much of the online experience also comes from
what we decide to look for. Being online itself is not the main thing - it is what we do online that matters. Mere zombie browsing is obviously a time waster.

RSS feeds, Twitter updates, iTunes podcast subscriptions, Online university material, News updates - how many times do we prune this to get only material is important and relevant to us ? Undoubtedly we have some searching to do to get the best out of the net but we forget this involves deleting too ! I personally unsubscribe/unfollow blogs/people that I don't feel are adding value to my online experience. Yes it may mean that I might miss that fantastic article on the perfect way to blog ....but if I have to hunt through 200 articles for that one ... I am better off without it !! :)

Same goes for the need to know the latest news asap. C'mon - current news is old news tomorrow. Lots of days we can live without reading the newspapers / news updates too !! :)) You just have to go and browse for top 10 news of last week / month to get the relevant details when you get back online ! :)

Another thing is ... time taken for a few tasks - especially the mundane ones !! We can limit them - fixing a time may ensure we do not squander time on non-essentials.

On the whole awareness is what will help .... being online cannot make us efficient unless we evaluate what we do - all the time ! :)) There are lots of books and tips on how to be more productive and I will not get into that but the bottom line is that it all fails if we do not tailor it to our needs.

Mind you - these are my inputs and a lot of you may think it is easy for me to say this since I am not working and juggling home life and office life. But the addiction to being online all the time affects me too ! :)

May be though; sometimes nothing but cold turkey works - so get off the net / twitter / facebook etc for a couple of days - the earth will still revolve around the sun !!!! :))

And sadly may be nobody will miss you ! ;)