Loneliness and challenge

 I came across this line while browsing on quora, "If you have power to go to restaurant or cinema alone, you can achieve anything". I would like to add "travel to places" to above statement.

This is very interesting and most powerful statement. More than the pain of loneliness, social response to the situation is what I am afraid of. Perhaps, I just have to overcome this fear and just do it. This line came as a silver lining as I was beginning to slide into the side, which is full of despair. 

I planned a lot of things to keep me in the positive side, but unable to succeed in any of them. Now, I have found this new hope, let me see how far I can take it.

All the best to myself!

The Kite Flying

 It is always exciting to answer the question - When was the last time you did something for the first time?

That is the reason for this post! Yes, I flew a Kite for the first time in my life on Jan 15, Sankranti day. When friends invited me for Kite flying, I wasn't sure, the sceptical in me did not want me to go, as I was afraid that I might fail and feel sad. But I had heard somewhere, a healthy emotional state is to be open for new things. I wonder if the universe conspires such things when I need them or these things are always around and I just hear/read/notice them when I am in low emotional state.

So, I decided to go. Harsh and Jainil taught me how to tie the kite to the tether. It is all aero dynamics, weight and balance. When I really tried flying, man it is a real skill. The way Jainil and Harsh's kites soared to the sky, they are pros. They were encouraging us to not give up. After a long time of failed attempts, Harsh boosted my Kite took flight. Masters gave clear instructions on what and what not to do. When my Kite soared high, the feeling was indescribable. I had discovered a new me, there was joyous feeling that I had done something new. I felt like a part of me was flying.

The kite is controllable as long as it is tied to the tether. It has wings, a nose and anchor (or tail) that guides the nose. When wind sweeps over the, due to the pull from tether, drag and lift are created and the kite takes flight. When we pull the tether, the kite moves in the direction of the nose. When we let the tether loose, it starts to circle around and at the right direction, pull the tether and kite flies higher and farther. Kite falls to the ground when separated from tether. It was a great experience and will become one of my core memories!!

A lot of feelings swept through me after this. In fact, I always thought my life is like a kite. Sometimes I am sick of things (someone, some emotional attachment etc.) that are holding me back, but like the kite, some of these may be things that are holding me together.
When the kite starts to nose dive, one should loosen the tether so the kite turns around and then pull, so kite climbs higher. When our plans fail, we nosedive emotionally. It is a very fragile state, a slight push can break us and we end up doing things that can't be reversed. We should just give some slack until we regain sanity and then push us to make right decisions.

The Kite flying experience allowed me to discover new me and I am sure I became a slightly better person! Thanks to all friends who were part of this!!

The retrospection

This was partially composed almost 2 years ago. This time there are real reasons for my absence from blogging and my laziness is not one of them. I am glad about this.

As I ponder over events of the years that passed, it was a quite tricky and challenging. The impact of the Covid 19 pandemic, having been the victim of biggest deception and betrayal, emotional support of friends and family, shattered plans, yet I managed to keep my emotional health in check. Isn't that a great achievement compared to the turmoil I went through in past few years.

I regularly worked out until my eye surgery. After the recovery mind did its tricks and won over my will, I gained a lot of weight, reduced physical activity and reached, probably the worst physical shape yet in life. My workout attempts did not continue past a week. I had motivation, but I had stronger reasons not to. It is funny to dwell on those reasons, yet mind played the trick and won all the time.

All my plans of learning new language, music are still in the planning stage.

Perhaps work is the biggest factor that held me together. I too needed that. I buried myself in work, work consumed me, and above all the team bursting with positive energy kept me from falling into the trap. Yet again, I am hoping 2023 is going to be the best year yet.

Insomnia - How I hacked mine

Ever since lockdown started, everything changed. This was unprecedented in our lifetime. It is like when you deviate from routine, life becomes chaotic. The chaos, restrictions and anxiety of what is future going to be was causing its side effect on everyday life.

In a matter of days, I was finding it difficult to fall asleep. All kinds of thoughts were haunting me, mind was processing these thoughts restlessly. There were nights I had slept for 4 to 5 hours and working following day, continuously for more than 10-12 hours. I tried hard, counting numbers 1 to 100, back to 1 with deep breaths, I remained wide awake. Eventually, I started watching movies to kill time, late nights sometimes till early mornings.

This went for weeks. Lower back pain started showing up, some days it was so severe. I felt intense pain when waking up in the morning. The back pain had completely vanished after my cult fit workouts. This was getting worse.

I started working out at home, thanks to live.fit. But my sleeplessness continued. Unfortunately, there was no relief to my lower back pain also.

My comrade friend was also facing the Insomnia. We decided to hack our way through this. We analysed the situation. It was very clear that, our problems were playing in our minds, causing restlessness in brain. It was a vicious cycle, sleeplessness was causing disturbing thoughts, which in turn was keeping the brain awake. As the brain was not getting enough rest, the body was not getting recovery time.

We concluded that one way is to find solutions to problems. If that is not possible, most of the times we can't solve what we can't control. We can try to improve situation. That is what comrade chose.

It was not possible in my case. 

Around this time two things happened. 

While cleaning my stuff, I found this book, Silva Mind Control Methods, that I had bought in a thrift store 18 years ago. I went through first chapter which explained about brain wave activity. It explained different stages of brain activity, technics to lower brain wave activity and how it improves body recovery. It was fascinating. I just had to believe it. I had counted 1 to 100 and 100 to 1, but in vain. This time I had a basis to believe. I believed.

In a span of few days, I stumbled across this Mind Valley promotion video in which Vishen Lakianai was talking about ultramind. It was all quite familiar tricks and when he mentioned that he learnt it in a Silva mind control workshop, I was like wow.... what are the possibilities of coincidence? 

This was the answer to my calling. I will be a fool if I still did not believe. I believed I can control my mind, by controlling mind I believed I can become more productive.

I just visualized my brain and waves emanating from it, and lowering the frequency of those waves and I fell asleep. Voila, I had hacked my Insomnia.

Several weeks have passed now, my lower back pain has significantly reduced. I am feeling quite healthy and positive. When things are going good, something happened. Coursera suggested me to join the course - "A Life of Happiness and Fulfilment". 

Now what are the odds? Is it coincidence or some divine hands are at play? Whatever it is I am enjoying it.

The Storyteller's Secret - A fiction by Sejal Badani

Last month, I finished reading The Storyteller's Secret a fiction after a long long time. Probably The Fellowship of the Ring was the last fiction book I read about couple of years ago.

It was interesting story. There are many secrets in everyone's life. That would not only impact them but many others connected to them. This is the story of what one's heart wants and what is dharma. When both contradict, is it OK to go against dharma? Below is my review on Goodreads about this book.

For me, Jaya's first hand experience of India and few other aspects are technically incorrect, but pardonable. Author has made lot of errors while building the facades for the story.
But the whole book is about Amisha and Ravi. Amisha was torn between what her heart wants and the societal morality. The author has built this dilemma pretty well, depicting the way Amisha was brought up in pre-independence era. The way she was looking for an identity as a story teller. Honest servant Ravi was a true comrade in Amisha's life.
I think even in the modern world, many people are torn between their heart and morality. The book was a page turner after halfway and ending was ok.
I don't recommend this as a must read, but not very bad either.

My success stories

After finding the root cause of my situation - My planning hell should no longer affect me. Somewhere, I was proud of having devised such an ingenious way of self deception!

• My first success, I revamped this blog and have been writing regularly. I hope to do so, as I don't have any more blockers.
• I finally completed the last assignment of Neural Network and Deep Learning course, which had become a blocker for many weeks.
• I have successfully hacked my insomnia and able to sleep peacefully. I even remembered yesterday's dream very vividly.

I should mention, there was a huge help by a comrade who was a co-hacker, thank you comrade. I want to write more about how I fixed my insomnia in another post.

Time to dream now :)

Life hack - My planning hell

Yes, I have become a victim of my own carefully crafted scheme of planning hell. After carefully analysing my life over last few months, that is hacking my life, I finally found the bug.

Let me explain what happened. Even I was shocked at the finesse of the deception and how it victimised me for so long.

I was probably at my emotionally lowest stage in my life. As they say, when you hit the bottom, only way is up. So I started asking relevant questions. Quora, Medium, Google and some coincidental movies - all helped me to come out of my misery. Though things are very personal at micro level, I figured there are 3 or 4 phases at macro level to find the purpose of life and lead a content one.

Analyse -> Plan -> Execute -> Evaluate -> Make corrections -> Execute (The cycle goes on).

Analyse

I carefully analysed, what I had, what I longed to have, what I needed to have and things that I can't have. Then, what I want to become - some realistic goals, how to achieve these goals. I realised, if I know my worst case scenario, it gives a lot of confidence as I know, I can't loose more than that. Actually it gives immense psychological confidence. Here I set a lot of goals, all of which may not be achieved, its OK to have fallback goals.

Plan

Next, after prioritising the goals, planned my steps to achieve them. Here everything seems to be well planned. A lot of stuff is written about this on the internet. Many folks have cautioned the danger of being in this phase for a long time. I fell victim here too. Dreaming about achieving the goals. This initially gives some Dopamine that gives a false impression that I am making progress. Over time, I started realising something was not correct. I am not making real progress. It didn't take much time to detect this and fix.

After this false success, I laid objective plans, like 

- I have to finish a course in a month. 

- Revamp the blog and update regularly.

- Read lot of books etc.

Here is where my genius brain induced the bug. For every step, I keep a pre-requisite step and trivialise it. I mean this pre-requisite step is so simple that I could do anytime. 

For example, the pre-requisite of writing blog regularly was to revamp the look and feel. That is so easy and I can do it anytime. Why now? When I am thinking this way, I am deliberately missing that this small, trivial step is blocking my progress over to the execution phase.

Same happens in upskilling goal. I shortlist the courses that I want to finish. Then I think I can just sign up for the course anytime, why now? There I blocked my progress to the execution phase.

Misery

I will keep blaming these trivial stuff are blocking my progress. When Dopamine wears off, I again go into the miserable state. Since I have already been there, this time I fall into a local minima. It is easy to rise from here. Then I feel confident again, because it is not new, I have already risen from a global minima.

The vicious cycle

The cycle continues. The depth of fall is quite shallow and frequency of the cycle increases.

It appears like an elaborate scheme of mine to cheat myself. I don't know if I knew it all along so objectively or I was a real victim. Now that I know the problem and the solution. I hope I can make a progress to the execution phase. Execute -> Evaluate -> Correct -> Execute is also a cycle, but that would have made me a better human being and a content one too.

This post appears to be lacking finesse but I am not falling into the same trap :) 

The change is coming

After a lot of procrastination, I finally acted today. As usual lot of thoughts faded in my mind. They were my treasures. This dialog from The Lunchbox, caught my attention - "we forget things if we have no one to tell them to"
It is so true, some thoughts that would become a happy memory will fade within the murky puddle of random thoughts in mind, this is the place to preserve them.
A lot has changed since my last post, personally and worldly.
I have begun hacking life for better reasons. Time can only tell how long I will sustain it this time. Something tells me, this time, it is for a long long time. "A feeling".