While I await 2008

New Year's Eve has always been a time for looking back to the past, and more importantly, forward to the coming year. It's a time to reflect on the changes we want (or need) to make and resolve to follow through on those changes. In the light of this beautiful thought, I have identified a set of changes I want to make to myself and a difference to the people around.

Tame the bulge - Over 66 percent of adult Americans are considered overweight or obese by recent studies, so it is not surprising to find that weight loss is one of the most popular New Year's resolutions. However, the statistics in my case are a bit interesting. First of all I am an Indian at heart and secondly I weigh only 152 lbs. I am a little over 5' 8" which sets my lower and upper weight limits to 137 and 171 lbs respectively, the target being 154. Wow, that sounds close :) Now what I need to focus on is not losing weight, but to convert fat to muscle and distribute it evenly throughout. Well, that determines what needs to be changed and there being only a single key to achieve this I resolve to exercise regularly.

Keep learning - This is one thing I want to do just without any reasons. Alright, no lies, I guess it keeps me inspired and motivated, it gives me the driving force for all my thinking, and may be it also gives me a sense of satisfaction and value adddition. I hope I can learn something new each passing moment. Sounds more like a wish than a resolution :) but I'll make my best efforts to grasp things from everyday activities. A simple TV show, a chat with a friend, a discussion with a group, a simple read, a movie... each of these has a lot of potential to teach and there is just so much opportunity out there to learn! I just need to dance with oppurtunity while its still on the dance floor.

Forgive and forget - Forgiving is allowing another person to be human for faults, mistakes, or misdeeds. Forgetting is putting these behind you; they are no longer brought up with no ongoing negative references to the event and no longer remain a barrier to your relationship. I guess everybody knows what it is, its just a matter of accepting it. I am very glad I already have this ability to forgive and forget and I will continue to make it better.

Help others - A theory of physics is called 'The Butterfly Effect". This states that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can begin a chain of events in the air around it that causes a hurricane somewhere else on the planet. Like the way an avalanche must begin with a single grain of snow, as just one grain had to be the first. I resolve to volunteer to help people around me. Volunteerism can take many forms. It may come in the form of a few moments I spare from my busy schedule; or if time is in short supply, then donating furniture clothing and other household/personal items I no longer need rather than leaving them out by the curb. It may even come in the simplest form where I just spend a few moments trying to convince someone to help others.

Spread around peace, happiness and love - All the time, every moment of the day, we're in this world and either making it better or making it worse. Because we're all inter-connected, our thoughts spread out and affect everything around us. When we feel bad, we might treat people in an ill-natured or thoughtless way, which can lower their mood, and they might do the same to the next person they meet, and so it carries on. Perhaps, my bad mood could travel through various other minds, fanning out, until it eventually brings one person down enough to cause a family argument, may be in another country! One thing I intend to do to alleviate the precarious position that we are all in is to consciously spread happiness. I want to deliberately radiate happiness outwards. Also, making other people happy is curative in itself. Even if it's hard to make myself happy, making other people happy will distract me from my own mind.

Lastly, I've decided to be more flexible - Despite having set the above goals, I foresee that my plans will skew somewhat from the original. Not that I want them to, I am saying the plans will skew because life has a funny way of throwing unexpected things at us and flexibility is required to complete anything but the simplest goal. Sometimes the goal itself will even change. Most of all, I hope to recognize partial successes at every step along the way. Just as a resolution isn't accomplished the day it's stated, neither is it accomplished the day you reach your goal. Rather, it's accomplished in many small increments along the way. Acknowledging these incremental successes as they come is the way to go in life!

I hope and pray 2008 brings to all of us the best of everything.

Hidden feelings...

How can I begin to explain?
This feeling that bonds me to you like a steel chain,
It holds me back, when you are near,
When I'm afraid, when I'm in fear.
Every night in my dreams, I feel you near me,
Are you so blind, you cannot see?
What I feel for you is so, so real,
But, should I tell you how I feel?
Why do I feel this way?
The same emotion day after day,
How could I know our friendship would turn out this way?
Am I doing the right thing by telling you how I feel?
Or when I wake-up, will this just not be real?
I'll always remember the talks we shared,
That sometimes could last all day,
When we were comfortable saying nothing,
The silence would be okay.
For you, I would gladly walk a mile,
If that would give me a chance..... to see you smile,
I'd call you my friend, but that would be a lie,
You mean more to me, but I can't explain why......
For you are more precious to me
Than all of the world's gold,
But I can't tell you that,
How can I be that bold?
If I spoke what's on my mind,
Would you accept me?
Because without you,
I don't know where I’d be.
Things you don't know, feelings I don't let show,
Secrets, hidden deep in my soul,
I would love the chance to show you what you deserve,
A chance to give you more than the whole universe.
I can't describe how much you mean to me,
For the vision is clouded so you may not see,
I don't even try to explain, how my heart longs for you,
Because I know I can't.... no matter what I do.
I don't know if I should forget it or just give it time,
I wish I could keep my heart from controlling my mind,
I know someday... I will eventually find
But only when it is right and in God's due time.
So until the day, that the spell is broken,
I must keep my love for you.... unspoken,
As I sit and watch the calm sea,
I wonder if true love between us can ever be...

- Mon, Nov 17th 2003

Expectations v/s Hopes

When I was very young I heard and since then remembered two sayings from two of my different teachers. The sayings go as..."Expectations are the root cause of misery" and "Never loose hopes, coz hopes are the only ropes that'll support you". I thought a lot over these two and weighed them considering numerous instances from my own life as well as others life in general.

What I noticed was that sometimes I was hurt because I expected too much from others, that indirectly means there is a limit in every friendship that I should not cross. If it were in my hands, I would brush aside this limit...but unfortunately it needs two to tango!

Moreover, friendship needs time to grow...even I can't be a best of a friend to everyone who comes my way, although it varies that some people may turn out to be very good friends in a very short span of time while others just remain strangers even in years' relationship!! My initial friendship with anyone always turned out to be good... but then over time when I knew the person truly and better, I found most of them to be mere role players. In between these two phases I remained the same self... and that didn't prevent me from being demanding. The cases where friendship is true are very pleasing and euphoric, I mean nothing can make atleast me feel better than possessing a true friend. On the other hand, cases where friendship turns out to be something different, are very hard and uneasy to handle...they just break me.

I once had a dream to perfect (and include in a stereotype) the search and selection techniques into a science so that one can predict almost infallibly on the very first meeting with any person, whether or not the person is worth making a friend. The stereotype was a joke but the search and selection thingie is something everyone should be aware of. I try to strain my brains as much as I can... but still sometimes I make wrong decisions...after all I am a human being ( I hope u agree with this).

I dunno what I have written and how you would interpret it, but to recapitulate, I would say that I still live with hopes in my heart rather than living with the fear of getting hurt on expecting and not getting the expected.

Be positive, its in my blood (B+ve)

LIFE: what is it?

Life isn't about getting good marks in college. It is not about how many people call you and its not about who you've kissed, what sport you play, or which girl likes you. Its not about your shoes or about your hair colour or the colour of your skin or where you live or go to college. Infact its not about rank, money or clothes. Life isn't about if you have lots of friends, or if you are alone, and its not about how accepted or unaccepted you are. Life just isn't about that.

But life is about who you love and who you hurt. It pertains to how you feel about yourself. Its about trust, happiness and compassion. Its about sticking up for your friends and replacing inner hate with love. Life is about avoiding jealousy, overcoming ignorance and building confidence. Its about what you say and what you mean. Its about seeing people for who they are and not what they have. Most of all, its about choosing to use your life to touch someone else's in such a way that could never have been achieved otherwise. These choices are what life is all about...

Just as I am about to post this note, I remember a line from a famous hindi song:
"zindagi ek alag cheez hai... zinda rehna alag baat hai.."

To sum up... life is strange!

The pursuit of happYness

“I apologize for spamming you all with this. This is something that's been churning around my head for a while now, and I needed to write it. This little rant is not really intended to make big differences to you, instead its just an introduction to happiness”

[1] Stop assigning blame.

This is the first step. Stop assigning blame and leave the past behind you. You know whose fault it is that your life isn't perfect. Your boss. Your professor. Your lover. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is — you've been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.

Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn't real. If we're not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn't matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don't spend your energy dwelling on it — you have other things to do.

I may sound cruel, I may sound simplistic, I may sound like I'm saying you should just “get over it”, by suggesting that you should let go off your past. I'm sorry for that. But life won't hold still and wait for you to lick your wounds. The race is still being run. Get up and keep moving. You can't do anything about yesterday. You can do something about tomorrow. And about the next day. Focus your energies there.

[2] Surprise yourself. No — amaze yourself.

“I don't have time to write.” “I can't dance.” “I can't talk to new people.” “I'm not attractive.” I hear this all the time. I always hear the people around me sabotaging themselves, drawing lines and borders and boxes around themselves. To which I say, make the time; dance; just talk to people; be attractive!

Yes, again, it's simplistic of me to say that. But it's simplistic of you to so easily say what you cannot do!

We're excellent pattern-matchers. That's what the human mind does — it's a pattern-matching engine. So we look at ourselves, at our history, at our behaviors, and we draw straight lines between the points — we assume that just because we've done things a certain way in the past, we'll always do them that way in the future. If we've failed before, we'll always fail.

Screw that!

You don't have to keep doing the things you hate. Why go home and beat yourself up for, say, not going over and saying a few words to someone you find really attractive? Can any damage they could do to you by rejecting you possibly be any worse than the damage you're going to do to yourself for missing the chance?

[3] Find the demon.

Do you know what I'm talking about? It's the little voice in the back of your head that's always whispering, “You can't”. You know the demon. You may think you hate the demon, but you don't. You love it. You let it own you. You do everything it says. Everytime there's something you want, you consult the demon first, to see if it will say, “You can't have that."

What you don't realize is that your demon doesn't know anything. It's an idiot. It's nothing but a parrot, repeating back to you anything negative that it's ever heard, anything that makes you hurt, makes you squirm. If a teacher once told you “You'll never accomplish anything,” it was listening; it hoards words like that and repeats them back to you to watch you jump. It doesn't know what it's saying. It doesn't care.

[4] Exorcise yourself.

You can take me literally or not, as suits you. But do, please, the next time you hear that voice in your head, imagine it, visualize it, as something physical that you can get hold of; tear it out of you, feel its fingers weaken and lose their grip on your spine, and grind it to dust, to nothing, under your boot heel on your way out to dance in the streets.

You can. You think you can't; but it's telling you that. You can.

[5] You don't exist. You just think you do.

We're nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. We know in our hearts what kind of people we are, what we're capable of, because we've told ourselves what kind of people we are. You're a carefully-rehearsed list of weaknesses and strengths you've told yourself you have.

(Self-confidence, for example, is a particularly nebulous quality you can easily talk yourself out of having.) You owe no allegiance to that self-image if it harms you. If you don't like the story your life has become — tell yourself a better one.

Think about the person you want to be and do what that person would do. Act the way that person would act. Amazingly enough, once you start acting like that person, people will start treating you like that person. And you'll start to believe it. And then it will be true.

Welcome to your new self!

Despite everything I've just said, self-examination can be paralysis. Don't “remember to breathe” — just breathe. It's a Tao thing. It's the paradox at the center of all this — remember that, “Am I living up to being the person I want to be?”, is not a question the person you want to be would ask.

If I can leave you with just one thought, it's this:

Stop wasting your time fretting over not being happy. Just be happy!