My Maths teacher, Prof. Jayaram sir always used to quote “There is limit for everything except for limits themselves”. Coupled with this used to be another quote : “Change is the universal constant”. These quotes transcend the simple academic barriers and apply equivocally to all facets of life. Little did I realise that these are philosophical. As I sit and think back, I understand the age old wisdom that everything requires a time and situation to comprehend the meaning completely.
2023 June was a life altering time for me. My Appa’s swargavaasa meant that there was a sudden void which was real, palpable and quite draining on mind. I have always thought, why did I feel like this after my Amma’s untimely demise? The only answer I always come up with is Appa. Dealing with his loss meant that I started spending a lot of time with myself, thinking, pondering & just numb. During this time, I re-read one of my favourite books, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He is one amazing personality from our history whose life should be read and reread multiple times. There are many nuggets of timeless wisdom that one can derive out of his illustrious life. Personally, I resonated with one of his traits i.e. review every Saturday evening. Coupled with a nudge from a very good friend of mine, I took up journalling. This lead to rediscovering one of my lost loves, Stationery.
I started to dabble in multiple formats of Journalling - Scrapbooking (I love this.. helps to admire beauty in almost everything) to organised journalling to BuJo (Bullet Journalling) to a simple pocket notebook to note down ToDos to an everyday carry idea book. Recently, when I embarked on a vacation, I landed up writing a travel journal (technically I am yet to complete this, but it’s almost 90% done).
This lead me to think about my day-to-day life in general. One of my distractions was the digital watch with constant notifications. Beyond these trivial stuff was my tendency to dive into the health parameters. I have to admit that I have got quite an earful from my physician (he is like father figure to me). I started to think about the dependency on gadgets and started down a rabbit hole that lead lot of reflections that quite frankly held a mirror to me. As a policy, I am active on one social media platform i.e. Twitter. WhatsApp is more communication and I don’t really subscribe to channels etc. Telegram too is similar. There have been some instances in the past which have left a very deep emotional scar. Coupled with this was my own desire to get engagements and visibility on the platform, an acceptance of sorts.
When I started to note this down, I realised one point : I am responsible for what I go through and I need to make some changes for my long term happiness. So I drew up a plan to make some changes in life.
- Get rid of the digital watch (quite a few takers in the family)
- Go back to a standard analog watch
- Use paper and pen for everything - Trivial ToDos to professional notes (this I was already doing) to Journalling
- Compartmentalise time on social media (Twitter) - Keep it focussed
- Let go of expectations - Tweet what you feel like and move on - Don’t worry about engagements (this helps a lot)
- Prefer physical books than Kindle (though I am forced to use Kindle due to space constraints)
- Plan the day first thing in the morning (Earlier I used to do this for professional part, now extended to life)
- Weekly review, replan and strategise
I need to see how this will pan out. However, I can safely say that this is helping me a lot. I will continue to be active on twitter with focus on Dharma, Spirituality, Book reviews etc. This is more of an inner journey to become detached to the situation and not be a slave to digital devices.
One step at a time …
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