I have always known that I am blessed, but for the first time ever in my life I realise the true extent of this blessing. I have been blessed with the things that I didn’t even know I needed. Like, for example, that I can have a life in addition to this thing called work. Don’t get me wrong, work is something which I have always loved. I have managed to stay in the same job for a while now, and over the years, I have been loving different aspects of it. And that’s completely fine, because I think that’s just a function of how the job grows and how the person doing the job (aka me) grows. When we have the time and space to grow together, well, what more can you ask from life.
As it turns out, there are a lot. And for some reasons I am yet to comprehend, I never asked for those things. At least not consciously anyway. And because I end up having all these things without asking or them, I feel so incredibly blessed. I have toyed with the idea of a balanced life without exactly knowing what it comprises. I have been asked over the years by one too many people about having a balanced life, without exactly knowing what it really is. I guess, you know, the usual, something to do, something to look forward to and someone to love would suffice. Or at least, make a good start.
The younger, and what I often referred to as the more ambitious version of myself, did not foresee my current life 5, 10 years ago. From this perspective, it is definitely a case of total, complete and utter failure. Because if I were to think back to 5 years ago, and I remembered the things that I said I wanted to have done… ho hum. Well. Okay. About that.
Actually, this was a total lie. Some five years ago was the year 2015 and man, that was a difficult year. So difficult that I had to admit defeat and seek the help of professional therapists to sort myself out. As much as I was (and still am) a big proponent of self-love, I did not love myself very much back then.
As part of these therapy sessions, I was reminded to, quite bluntly, stop planning. I remember looking at my therapist and thinking: well, that was a joke right. What’s the point a life that’s not planned? I am a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I ended up asking that question out loud. And in a typical therapist response, I got that very same question thrown back at me. Dude. If I had known what the answer is, do you think I would ask the question.
They say that an examined life is almost as good as the difficult questions that we ask ourselves. I think there’s something missing in that sentence. Something like “… almost as good as finding the answers to the difficult questions we ask ourselves”. Because asking the questions – no matter how difficult they are – is the easy bit. All we need is the willingness to engage with ourselves (or with our higher selves, or deeper selves, however you put it). The questions I asked myself started with this: why was planning so important to me. Was it the actual plan itself, or was it the process of planning, or was it something much deeper than these? Like maybe, it was about, you know, control. Not just any kind of control, but the kind that denotes some form of control towards one’s destiny. The big, powerful shit that no one really knows about, often disguised as the power of the mind, or imagination. (This is not to negate the power of visualisation and imagination and basically the power of the mind itself. Look, it’s a complex issue and deserves its own exploration and discussion.)
The anti-climax of this whole story is that I still don’t know for sure what it is about planning that was so important to me, but I have stopped planning so much. Or I should really say, I stop planning altogether. This took a lot of people by surprise because I literally stop planning things with them. What can I say, these days, I take things as they come. And that this lack of planning drive a lot of people nuts, I totally get that. Look, it is not that I am incapable of planning anything, it is more like I choose not to plan anything. If you say that one too many times, you’ll start believing that it’s an active choice. Anything that you do voluntarily and willingly often tastes better than the things that you do begrudgingly. I mean, attitude peeps. Attitude.
So, the real question then becomes: how has this not-planning thing been working for me? Has it had the effect that I intended it to have? Yes, the irony does not escape me that in engaging in not-planning, I actually plan for something else to happen in my life. Did that thing happen? Yes. That thing is what I call … peace. I didn’t realise how much pressure I put on myself to make things happen. It was like there was this insatiable desire to achieve, to do better, to be better. I stop projecting myself into the future and instead focus on staying in the present moment. And this brings a whole lot of peace and contentment of simply enjoying life as it is right now. The more I engage in this exercise, the more I realise that my Dad is right: everything in this life is temporary.
I used to look for permanence. I wanted to have that one thing that I would have for life – the dream job, the strong balance sheet, the right friends, the one great love, the one person I would love forever. Yet in the past year, I am slowly coming to the realisation that permanence is best achieved through a series of temporary moments strung together to make a coherent whole, accompanied by a humble mindset and holistic perspective of what’s to come. This makes a balanced life to be one that makes you a better human being overall, no matter what that life actually looks like. And to make it ‘balanced’, you gotta be willing to allow it to change with time.
If you give up on balance altogether, that’s completely acceptable. When life is good, life is good. Remember to focus on the important things, like how lucky we are to be the participants of this thing called life. We may have to fight for a lot of stuff, nothing is ever just handed to us. It is this chance to fight that makes life worth living. That we get to have a shot. We get to be vulnerable. We get to be uncomfortable. So that we get to grow.
