I almost didn't write today. Taking decisions is the worst thing for me. I hate having to choose between option 1 and option 2. I do everything around it, I will write down pros and cons of each option and weigh them rationally. I will also try and listen to my heart and see where it's guiding me. But i always end up second-guessing myself. "What if the heart doesn't know what's best for me?", or "What if I come to regret this decision" - and usually this for stuff like shall I have another cup of chai today or not. So then imagine what i do for the bigger things in life. The answer is nothing. The biggest decisions are the easiest for me to make. I think about it way less than I should. The amount of time I invest in wondering whether I should go for a shower now or later, doesn't match up with the amount of thought I put into the real-life decisions.
Someone once told me I was a constant worrier and that I had to have something to worry about because if that was not happening - I'd not know what to do with my brain. I don't think that's true - i have many other things to be preoccupied with when I'm not worrying about stuff. I also have moment of bliss and peace and calm when i have nothing to think about. If you leave me be, I can sit and stare at the clouds moving very slowly across the skies or I can lay down on the grass at night and stare up at the starry skies blinking away. And there'll be nothing on my mind or in my head. Pure silence. That's what I feel today pure silence - I have at least 5 decisions to take about my next couple of months and I am procrastinating because either I don't know or I don't want to think about it. Tomorrow, I promise myself. And when i think about them tomorrow, i'll go boom-boom-boom, all five decisions in a row and then not looking back.
Speaking of looking back, when I look back at my twenties, I see a pattern. My boss (ex-boss) said to me during a career conversation "you let life happen to you, you don't grab life with your hands and make it happen for yourself". I sat there wondering if that was true - i felt a mix of disappointment, anger, defensiveness & shock. In a matter of seconds, max a few minutes, I went through a gamut of thoughts. I wanted to pick up the remote laying in front of me and throw it at his face, I wanted to acknowledge that he had said the truth and maybe I should reflect on it, I wanted to tell him not all people need to function like him with every step of their career and lives planned. Maybe some find freedom in just being - of course such people don't become corporate CEOs. They go on to live fuller lives. Ah, there is me beginning to spite the corporate world, that's not the intention of this post.
I have never planned my life - when I have had to take decisions, I have either known instinctively what to do or gone ahead and closed my eyes, picked an option and jumped with it - that has not always been the best decision of my life, but I have managed to live it out and with great grandeur and happiness. From the decision to move to Hyderabad from Delhi to the decision to move roles to the decision to move back to Gurgaon and apply to roles in Singapore. I just did it. I of course had folks guiding me or advising me or sharing their opinions on the options I was faced with - but the final call has been mine. And yes, I have not always looked around and grabbed at opportunities or gone searching for it or been ambitious about things, but I have been happy nevertheless.
These days a lot of feminists talk about how being ambitious is not a bad thing and that men are never questioned or have to explain or rationalise their ambition, then why women. Absolutely - i couldn't agree more. But in the need to recognise all this ambition, somewhere we have forgotten that it is ok to also sometimes not be ambitious. Ok let me word that properly - ambition means different things to different people, my ambition and my definition of success and a good life will be very different from someone else's and that's ok.
So yes, maybe i have not consciously gone looking for paths to follow, but when presented with those paths, I have known which one to embark on. This "presented with those paths" bit is what my boss had a problem with i guess. I've also always jumped in without knowing how to swim. When I decided to start living by myself, i didn't think really sit and think about it for a million hours - i knew i wanted to do it and so i did it, similarly when i wanted to do a yoga teacher training course, I knew I wanted to do it and I signed up. When i spent huge amounts of money and time going and doing a short course with Le cordon Bleu at London, I knew I wanted to do it and I did it. I treat the biggest decisions of my life very nonchalantly. I still don't know if that is wise, but then nothing I have written on this blog is about being wise, it's about being me.
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much and sometimes I wonder if I think enough. I find myself to be a dangerous mix of "what's the big deal?" and "can't you see how important this is?" - I traverse all points in between those two spectrums, from opposite extremes to the casual middle, bordering on an almost careless attitude. And if you frankly ask me, I am very happy with that. I am not a planner, I do not take specific steps and write goals down and try and achieve them, I do not have a list of countries I want to travel to, i do not have a list of things I want to certainly have done in life, I do not have a specific amount of money to have in my bank account, I do not even have a pose or asana I am trying to master in my yoga practice right now. And I've always been like that - I used to be a lot more freer maybe in my early twenties than I am now. I say that not because I don't feel as carefree or careless (depends on how you look at it) when I'm 29, but because others expect me to be a certain way.
A certain amount of hunger shows you are more willing to move up the corporate ladder than not, a certain amount of "speaking up at meetings" shows you care more about your job or have an opinion, having "five year plans" means you take yourself, your career and your life seriously. Having certain material possession means you have made it in life. I have many more examples of such certain ways of being in today's world. In the book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari says that human beings are at the end of the day complex algorithms - nothing more, nothing less. And even the idea of having free will is actually just a perception. Which is quite a sad thought. It might be true and that makes it sadder doesn't it. And when we look around, of course we see algorithms. Many of us are set on a specific pattern of "achieving" things and experiences and even people.
Coming back to decisions - i don't know still whether my boss was right or wrong in saying I live life very passively by letting it happen. My only response to that today, as it was the day he said it, is - "So, what's so bad about that?". You should have seen the look on his face, it was quite priceless.
Every person has their own way to live life, their own ways to make decisions, their own ways to not make decisions, their definitions of ambition, their definition of love and lastly their definition of happiness and peace. If there's something the twenties has begun to teach me, with varying amounts of success, is that no one wants to be judged any more than I do. Every human being has their own story, their own motivations and reasons for embarking on the journey they've undertaken. No one is more right than you, neither are they wrong. I know this post started with decision making and how i suck at it and then detoured into my personal journey, dived into a little vehemence towards my ex-boss and then a commentary on allowing other people to be.
It is a bit confusing even to me , but I'll end with what my twenties taught me about all of the above - it is to not judge. While I like to flow freely and not have plans and not know what my next six months will look like let alone the next six years, that is because it works for me that way and I am happy being that way. But it may not necessarily be so for others. This realisation is hugely important to me - because it has taught me to take people for who they are and not what i want them to be. And I am not saying i am now this person who understands everybody else perfectly - i am only saying that I have begun the journey to do precisely that. So while I still roll my eyes at yogis following a particular style of yoga or talking about their chakras, I also know that I can't do anything about them and have to give them their space to breathe and not be a bigot. It's not always easy though, because most times I want to break out into laughter every time people talk hipster nonsense in respect to yoga but well, you live and you let live. No? :)
I don't have a Bollywood song for this post today and I don't want to force fit something. What i do have a gorgeous ghazal just because the Rahat fateh ali khan version decided to play on YouTube and also because this is actually quite perfect for the silence in my heart all through today :
koi umeed bar nahi aati
koi soorat nazar nahi aati
maut ka ek din muayyan hain aana
neend kyun rata bhar nahi aati
agay aati thi haal-e-dil par hasee
ab kissi baat par nahi aati
hum wahan hain jahan se humko bhi
kuch hamari khabar nahi aati
~ mirza ghalib
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