On reflection, failure, returning, and meeting life without resistance.
Over the course of hundreds of blogs that I have written, people have started to perceive me as an academic.
I don’t mind labels, as long as they are not mine.
But at this milestone-where I am curating all my work, all that I know, and all that I want to express in one place-it feels like the right time to pause and reflect.
Part of writing is learning. No input, no output.
Even if you are writing about nothingness and no matter, words are still needed to carry ideas.
I am an optimist walking through an inherently pessimistic course of life.
I am in my late thirties, and I have achieved nothing “remarkable” by society’s standards.
I’ve done many things, but I don’t feel like I have “arrived” anywhere.
Motivation alone doesn’t help you live an unrewarding, discouraging life.
But there is something else that has kept me going all the way from my teenage years into adulthood, as I step into the more mature years of life.
Something that stayed constant through both depression and bliss.
A mindset. A way of studying the state of life and the stage on which it happens.
I don’t mean this in a self-help-book way. It’s more like the principle of harvest.
A farmer wishes for a good yield, a healthy harvest every season.
By doing so, he takes responsibility for things he cannot fully control.
He can choose what to sow, how much and how long to work.
But he cannot control the rain, the sunshine, or the rats in the field.
I sowed and it didn’t rain. When it did, it was too much. I am yet to hit a truly good season. Still, I take responsibility for standing in the field until I see the harvest.
It would be a mistake, and a kind of self-sabotage, to say I haven’t earned anything.
I have the experience of working on some of the top animated TV series.
I love to write, draw, and paint.
I am blessed to have been able to do this for more than 24 years now.
More importantly, I have lessons-lived and learned.
If what you want to communicate doesn’t resonate with people, the ideas and the effort to communicate them become useless.
We turn into dysfunctional members of society. Disconnected.
And this disconnect comes from the split between brain and heart, intellect and emotion, rational and irrational.
Do I mean you must be both intellectual and emotional? Not necessarily. That differs from person to person.
But here is what I am sure of: to understand and to communicate, we need balance.
The mind is one of the most complex subjects to examine. We often build our lives only on emotions or only on facts and conditions.
Sigmund Freud plunged into the depths and the subconscious. Albert Ellis emphasised rationality.
These are two polarities of the mind. Almost black and white.
To truly understand these polarities, we need a third kind of mind.
A wise mind.
For a few people, it comes naturally. Many of us have to be trained to think wisely.
The trap is believing that either the emotional mind or the rational mind is “good” or “bad”.
But if you listen to the conversations we have inside ourselves, they are often dystopian. Out of balance.
Most of our conversations are emotional. We talk about our feelings, beliefs, and thoughts.
It’s a tiring endeavour we carry on all our lives. It lacks maturity when it is only reactive.
Being reactive to everything is a disconnected way of living.
On the other hand, rationalising everything can cut you off from your emotional side.
A person can have all the knowledge in the world, but what is the point if they lack the empathy to apply it in real life?
So the purely emotional and the purely rational positions are both disconnected and, in a way, irrelevant.
Both have thoughts and ideas. Both lack application.
The solution is to think critically. This is where the wise mind comes in.
Being wise is the ability to not fall victim to ideas, thoughts, circumstances, situations, or people. It is the capacity to respond instead of react.
Being wise also means avoiding the trap of over-rationalising everything and dismissing what matters to others. I used to do both, and it made life unnecessarily complicated. You can sense that in my early blogs.
A person who cannot express ideas in simple terms is often trapped in the complexities of his own mind. He is trying to understand the understanding, not the concept itself.
Similarly, an overly emotional person lives inside the idea of living, not the experience of life.
Both states are far away from reality. Life is simple; anything excessively complex is usually unnecessary.
You can estimate the nature of your world by gazing outward.
You can discover the universe by stepping inward.
You will miss it if you try to understand it through the lens of emotions and rationality.
The world is a reflection of me — nothing more, nothing less.
Success and failure are annotations, not absolute truths. I did things, and they went a certain way. By acknowledging this, I take responsibility even for what I cannot fully control. It is that simple. That’s mature.
We do not need complex philosophies to operate in the world.
The solution to most complex problems is often very simple.
The way you love someone is often very simple.
And life becomes a quiet bliss when kept that way.
The real path is not this way or that way, but the middle way — the way of inquiry, contemplation, and reflection.
Building a life is not enough. We must not forget to live it in its entirety.
This is the reason I started writing again: to abstract and simplify the way I look at life.
It wasn’t from words of counsel that I found confidence in so-called failure.
It came from reflection.
I have lived a colourful life. A beautiful accident. And I love it.
I have paid the price of living on my own terms, but I have also gained the kind of knowledge that only mistakes can teach. I carry scars on my body, and yet I face life with grace.
This courage is born out of simplicity.
That is the crux — to be simple, you have to be courageous enough to accept life in its simplicity.
Many people find that boring, because simplicity forces them to live with themselves.
And man has lost the appetite for his own company, his own presence, his own awareness.
But I have returned.
I don’t know for how long — responsibly uncertain –
But I no longer carry the weight of my life experiences or the shadows of near-death.
I don’t carry any cross, not for myself, not for anyone.
This changed because of the reflective nature of the mind.
It reflects reality as it is.
Things come, and things go.
Nothing impresses me anymore.
Nothing stays.
Impermanent.