A little over a year ago, I purchased a worn-out copy of ‘Yours Faithfully: Letters From The Famous About God’ — authored by Jeff Thorburn — from a second-hand bookshop in Bengaluru.

The anthology contained 120+ views on God & life, by people who had supposedly ‘made it’ — celebrities, leaders, and the likes. More than a hundred ‘valuable’ life philosophies for me to choose from, select, rob and live by. However, none of them stuck; except two lines by Esther Rantzen in the foreword:

“All the same a pattern emerges from this anthology. These are all people who have explored their own beliefs, they have clearly struggled over the years to decide whether life is merely a series of random accidents, or if they are fulfilling a designed destiny.”

My search for meaning has evidenced the futility of the activity. People don’t find meaning, they create it — using self-acknowledged ways of leading lives, amidst murky distinctions between right & wrong, in a grand resounding of the fact that life is best lived as a subjective experience.

This tiny piece of writing is an attempt to define how I wish to lead my life, with the help of six concrete aphorisms that I am trying to live (early) adulthood by.

disclaimer: I hope you don’t expect profundity from this. For now, I am convinced with the points I make; but perhaps I might not be in a few years and this article will sit in the neat, little trash can of my computer.

inwards, not outwards

This is me, as a child, playing a sport.

This is me, as a teenager, about to play a sport that I supposedly love and am good enough to be competing in.

Growing up, nobody warned me about the dangers of living a life fuelled by extrinsic motivation. Somehow, I formed the inaccurate notion that life was best lived as an outward pursuit — chasing numbers, awards, acceptances and recognition. External achievement became the sole reason for pursuing activities, diametrically opposed to why I wrongly dribbled a basketball with both hands in the verandah when I was 4.

My relationship with sports evidences the dangers of living such a life, where enjoyable activities are robbed of their joy and are taken over by an insatiable hunger to stand above the rest.

I am convinced that I wish to lead my life as an inward pursuit, exploring & chasing feelings with the understanding of an adult.

Slow down, you crazy child

This year, I was introduced to the idea of ‘slowness’.

in a fast-moving world, slow is revolutionary.

In all my years of chasing results faster than I could achieve them, the idea of ‘taking time’ remained alien to me. Now that I’m older, privy to how other people think about their lives and having bore my fair share of ‘fast-pace-depreciation’, I understand that good (and bad) things take time, and that that’s okay.

Billy Joel asks “where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about” in his song Vienna, and, in the silence of the answer to that question, his words resound the idea of slowing down in my head:

Slow down you crazy child
You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
…
Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day

The tiny article that you’re reading right now has taken me more than 2 months to develop, and I’ve never been prouder of a piece of written work.

Tenderness & flowers

A term that has made its way in my life and stayed is tenderness. My mentor asks:

Despite everything that happened, amidst all the thorns, hurt & pain, can you still treat the situation with tenderness?

This is incredibly challenging to do and, maybe, it’ll take me an entire lifetime to learn how to be tender. For the last couple of years, I’ve begun keeping flowers in the living room of my house, as a subtle reminder to be tender to the prickly thorns outside.

Permission to feel

Even though I believe that I grew up in relatively open environments, certain degrees & kinds of feelings were still restricted to isolated corners. Despite public ridicule, I could never stop myself from feeling what I felt. I could bury them, and do it well, but I now know the accumulated hurt they can bring when they inevitably rise up.

s recently said:

I didn’t know to what extent you could feel, but now I know you feel a lot. Like a lot.

That statement eased me into a small well of acceptance within myself. Yes, maybe I do feel a lot, and maybe it’s not such a bad thing. For years, my creative practice has rested on my ability to feel and, going forward, I would like to give myself the permission to feel — even absurd things like feeling abandoned by a dog, feeling annoyed amidst love and feeling unheard despite talking.

It’s just a wave

Words from a John Mayer song sum up this one up concisely:

It’s just a wave and I know
That when it comes
I just hold on

Living by the sea for a couple of years has given rise to an analogical thread between waves and life — all things, good or bad, rise up in places you can’t see, grow to an unexpected peak and come crashing down the shore to make space for the next one.

This eventuality is inevitable — the rising and crashing of waves, just like the rising and crashing of good & bad things in life. Some waves hit harder and some waves take longer to settle, but all of them do and the shore sits idly, waiting for the next one.

factors

Life seems to be made up of certain unavoidable ‘factors’. Here is an acknowledgement of some:

activities:
I must do things with my time, for different reasons. Some activities for sustenance, while others for joy. Pursuing activities for a single reason can be hazardous. Balance is key.

Environment:
I do not exist in a vacuum, and am always surrounded by things — organisms, chemicals, objects, air. All the things that surround me, over time, affect my personality. Therefore, I must be selective, without being rigid, and consciously design the environment I exist in.

People:
Even though I fancied it as a teenager, it is virtually impossible for me to live alone like Thoreau at Walden Pond. I like human connections and, although I can (and will be) excruciatingly selective, I cannot be completely devoid of them.

Money:
I grew up with a frugal mindset, paired with hot-blood rebelliousness against capitalistic tendencies. However, as I grow older, I understand that money has its own space in the world and I must make some, if not much.

Relationship with Self:
I’ve run around trying to repair relationships with everyone, barring the most important one — with myself. My body & mind have been willingly abused, and it is time that I attempt to nurture them, just like I attempt to do with external relationships.

with love,
- a.