aimlessness

Have you taken a path without a destination?
Or have you considered walking a road without knowing where it will lead?

In simple terms, have you enjoyed the journey more than the outcome?

We are so engrossed in finding results or the future that we leave no room for the present. I wonder if aimlessness should be a virtue; at least we would have lived more in the present. We would have regretted less on things we missed out on kid’s first day in school or picking parents from the airport.

We are accumulating wealth for a better future. Everything runs around being uber-productive. We surrender ourselves to the treadmill getting overworked, sick, and isolated.

memory

I am not sure if it’s my age or growing up in a small town in Bihar; I enjoy reading writers like Satyajit Ray, Kushwant Singh, and Ruskin Bond. The way they narrate their stories, the incidents, and simplicity in writing. It takes me back to my childhood days and memories.

It’s like someone with his story taking me back to memory lane. I spend hours thinking and resonating with our fun days of childhood.

After moving out of Bihar in 2000 for senior secondary, the world has been different for me; I am at the cusp of modernization and part of new India, and It took me a few years to adjust.

The love for my village, town is still intact. With time we all have changed.
I have witnessed mass migration from the village. It is almost deserted now; only oldies, kids, and wives live there. Festivals like Holi or Diwali are no more the same.

Limelight

Limelight is valuable, the reason why social media exists and influencers.

Edward Barney’s book title Propaganda talks about how they sold cigarettes to women worldwide calling it empowerment. Or how the fiction of the banana republic was hatched to help American multinationals.

With so many internet mediums around our eyes, it is difficult to get attention and limelight. And attention being the currency of our time, it is more evident to get some even if it is positive or negative.

You will see the same influencers sharing their expert opinion for eyeballs on everything from COVID, politics, sports, or war.

So be careful and take a pinch of salt reading their opinions since most are shit posters with limited knowledge on the subject.

Time

We underestimate the virtue of time. In the startup world, be it growth in product, hiring, or fundraising. As a result, we build many things half-baked or burn bridges.

The race against time makes us all go nuts and affects us in all possible manners.

Netflix documentary on Boeing speaks how engineering and safety took back seats to keep Wall St happy.

The startup industry is going through the same where tax officials are making raids and board members are asking for more transparency from founders.

I understand there is limited time in our life. Does this mean that we can have a baby in 10 days instead of 9 months?

A few things take time, and we have to stay stoic and work being aware of it.

fear

This fear we live in is a disease in itself. It can do more harm than any good.

We can think of fear as a sum of our identity. It can be a collection of our vulnerability about how others are judging us or what will not work well in the future.

Another form of fear includes fear of losing someone or fear of dying.

We get so scared about thinking all of it that it creates disease in itself by giving us panic, shivers, or constant anxiety.

Can we kill the fear, we can If we want to live in peace.

Pranayam

Yoga is India’s gift to the world. Those sages who came up with it a thousand years back must be happy from heaven. Yoga’s adoption is global now.

I picked Be here now last week. The book is a personal journey of Ram Dass. It talks about his psychedelic trips and finding a guru in Neem Karoli Baba.

One part of the book talks about Pranayam, food, and Yoga. I liked it. Yoga came to me at a boarding school in Ranchi, class 4 or 5. I got back to it again five years back and mostly did simple breathing exercises.

After COVID in January, I had stopped doing it and was completely lost the last few months. Let’s see if getting back to Pranayam takes me back to the old days.

open

Some of us are so locked and hurt by past experiences that we never open up afterward. We end up becoming a living cynic. We see reasons in every opportunity offered to us. We focus on the negative side than conducting an overall holistic evaluation.

The other part of any opening or opportunity is its limited window. It is not there for us for eternity. When an opportunity hits, we have to accept it with open arms and see where it leads us.

Our negative thinking creates a blind spot, and even anything positive coming our way ends up leaving us because we are too busy finding the flaw.

In short, we are not open and not seizing the opportunity coming our way.

build

A masterpiece requires complete focus. One cannot build something incredible and sale worthy without it.

In the world we are living in, we want the best of everything and, as a result, we get lost. We get frustrated and sail on multiple ships without having control over even a single one.

Be it life or career or product development, having a focus resulting in execution matters over everything else.

Our monkey mind creates all the noise and incentivizes us to get lost. We have to be extra careful and avoid being a puppet to it.

insecurity

Our insecurity makes us do things that we would have otherwise considered irrational.

Is it because of our quest to fit in with the group or society?

Are we ignorant enough when we pretend to be who we are not?

What can go wrong with such actions? Are we going to be happy and content in the future?

We, humans, crave love, respect, and longing. As a result, we try to put our best foot forward by acting in a certain way, behaving in a certain manner.

sugar

Last few weeks, I have avoided sugar. Apart from rice, I was not taking anything else. The side effect of it was not getting enough sleep. Again, this is my observation.

I had some sweets yesterday, on the eve of Holi. After which, I good 8-10 hours of sleep. I am not sure if it was sugar or I was sleep-deprived all this while.