here's a poem I found at a temple in Japan
iki meaning life, gai meaning worth. ikigai therefore can be taken together to mean life's worth. Many blogs translate it to be the reason for living, the reason why you get out of bed every morning or the french phrase raison d'etre. These are all valid definitions and explanations - and I will not add more more blog post on what Ikigai means. But I will write about what Ikigai means to me.
For that, i'll have to repost the graph from the last post that shows the four circles that make up ikigai
Now before i left my job, I was doing something I was good at, doing something the world needs, and I was also doing something i was getting paid for. But it was definitely not what I loved. In fact when i was having leaving the team conversations with my boss, and we were throwing ideas at each other. He asked me one questions "Do you love what you're doing?" and I wanted to lie and say yes just to make him happy but I couldn't, so I said "no, maybe sometimes, but not always" and he first looked a bit shocked that I had said that and then smiled and said "so then you know the answer".
Again this is something most of my relatives (aunts and uncles) do not understand - why do you have to love what you do they ask. And I begin answering that question only to realise that it is a pointless explanation and not one I want to get into with relatives especially. So i smile, and i say stupid stuff like : im trying this out, lets see how it works, if it doesn't work, I shall figure something out eventually. Sadly, instead of calming them down, that causes the exact opposite effect - who would have thought!?
Now in the above graph if you look at the intersection of the green, blue and pink circles - you'll see "Comfortable, but feeling of emptiness". And that is exactly what I spoke about in my post yesterday of this feeling of living my life very inauthentically -a surge of these feelings would come up every 6 months and I would calm it back down until it resurfaced again. I'd hide behind a lovely vacation, escape to Bali every now and then, signing up for painting classes, buying new furniture for my already overcrowded house - basically a lot of things. It didn't make it go away, it only hid it under the carpet for the time being.
In a Ted Talk I watched about Ikigai, the speaker mentions a Yale professor Laurie Santos who teaches a program called The Science of Well Being, where she says the things that make us happy and have an impact on our baseline happiness are: kindness, meditation, time-affluence, spending time with friends and family.
Of those two things jump out at me : time-affluence and spending time with friends and family. Time affluence is to be able to do with your time what you want to do - and I genuinely feel like I am doing a lot more of what i want to do with my time than I was when i was in my previous job. Now, I am not saying everyone needs to leave their jobs and try and figure out what they want to do. There are people, and i have many such friends, who treat their jobs as jobs, as a source of income that enable their other passions. The joy they derive from pursuing their other passions on the side keeps them happy and adds to their life in innumerable ways. That is perfectly ok - I tried doing that but it just did not feel right for me.
The second factor is spending time with family and friends. Now, I love Singapore and I have many lovely lovely friends there. But sadly, all of them combined (or individually) could not shake the immense feeling of loneliness that engulfed me from time to time. I tried reaching out to them on various such occasions but I couldn't place that trust in them to be able to hold me in those moments of despair and sit with me while the storm faded out. I just couldn't find that in Singapore and that added much sadness to my life there. Which I am sure contributed to my feelings of "emptiness" - I was comfortable having friends I could hang out with when times were good, but I did not know who to call upon when times were bad. Now this is not a reflection of my friends - i think it is mostly me and my inability to place that trust in them, my fear of being let down that prevented me from even trying in the first place.
Lastly, the idea of sitting by yourself and eating your meals alone was just too sad a way to enjoy food. Im a lover of good food, I love to cook and part of the reason is because I love to host and I love being able to share those meals with people I love and care about. My friends and I would get together now and then and share meals but my day to day was me coming back home, cooking something and eating it by myself in front of the television. Not fun.
I am sure there would have been ways to solve that, I could have shared my flat with someone for example - but again, the loneliness from eating alone, was a symptom and not a cause of my emptiness. Chances are sharing meals with someone would have kept me happy for a bit and very soon, I would realise that the real cause was yet to be tackled. Now imagine feeling that and cleaning up after someone - ok sorry, but sometimes living alone is blissful you know!
So, the point is, now I have time-affluence and i share meals with my parents, which trust me is amazing! And I am enjoying what I do. I am sure the first two factors contribute to my chosen career, but I am also very sure that fulfilment in my career makes me see value in the above two aspects additionally as well. In the same Ted Talk, Tim Tomashiro shares the below words or verbs with respect to ikigai:
I feel being a yoga teacher enables me to do all of the above. All. It is amazing. Sharing my food with people through the medium of a cafe would also tick many of the above boxes and I know i will give that project a try again. Of course, i do realise that i am as they say in my "honeymoon period" of trying a new career and pursuing a passion. But, the thing is, I have been a yoga teacher now for a long time- a part time yoga teacher, but a yoga teacher nevertheless. So this is not entirely new to me - yes doing it full time is new and doing it for money is new. The struggle of finding new students, of promoting myself, of marketing is real and painful and sometimes it upsets me and makes me wonder if it will all ever work out. I believe, of course, that it will but sometimes it's easy to get perturbed and lose that insight - rarely happens now but I will not deny that it does. In spite of that, i feel like this might be it - my ikigai - what makes my life worth living.
There's loads more to learn. But there is a joy in creating something from scratch, living my authenticity and sharing my authentic voice with those around me.
Abraham Lincoln said "the best way to predict the future is to create it" and every day, little by little with every thing i read and everything I write and every class I plan and every class I teach, every student I come across, I am creating my future. What's more important is that i am living life as I do that, knowing that the process of creating something is as beautiful as the product itself.
Finding your Ikigai is not easy - it might turn out that my teaching job is a part of my ikigai and not entirely the whole of it. There's a lot of soul searching and deep inquiry involved in the process. I am ready for it, there's no better time than now. Inshallah.
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