The Gratitudinal Shift In Our Attitude

     

Gratitude is a powerful tool to unlock abundance. Appreciating the aspects around us does not come very easily, especially if you are on a downward spiral; you would find it a herculean effort to unearth the positives.

But the moot point is—are we trained to be grateful?

The constant chase

Fundamentally we all are trained to worry because the survival mindset kicks in every time we are on to something. So even if we have gained something, for example, success, it is hard for us to feel good about it; forget about being grateful. Even before the warmth of the moment mellows, we are on the lookout to chase the next thing and put all our efforts into attaining the unattainable. Every time we achieve something, we are on a next chase. To level up and accomplish more.

Pause and reflect

We are not taught to pause ourselves, take a moment to feel the joy that our accomplishments have offered us, revel in the moment, and feel grateful for it. This is what is called a ‘pause and reflect.’. When we pause and sit with the joyful moments, we become aware and appreciative of the things around us. It allows us to look around, observe the space around and within us, and be thankful for the journey we have travelled so far.

If gravitational force pulls us towards the ground, gratitudinal force pulls us towards abundance.

The following lines are so true—

Every time you praise something, every time you appreciate something, every time you feel good about something, you are telling the universe,

“More of this, please

 More of this, please.

The ‘Two’ defining barriers

Firstly, the lack of awareness poses a barrier to being thankful for our blessings. Second, we are induced with a guilt—thanks to societal conditioning, which has taken root in our subconscious—we think feeling joy is selfish. These two are the main impediments to letting the gratitude in our thoughts.

How can we make this ‘gratitudinal shift’ in our attitude?

1. Track the moments—Being observant of the happenings helps us be more mindful of the moments that we should feel happy and grateful about. Just keeping track of them as we go about the day by journaling it in our diary. Using pen and paper is better for the brain than using a digital means to articulate your thoughts.

2. Pausing, Sitting, and “Reflecting—‘Stillness helps heal our nervous system.”. Moments are fleeting and short-lived. Allowing some time in the day to sit with your moments is a first step towards reflection. Let the mind wander. It doesn’t matter if it highlights the low moments—sitting with them will help us heal from them. Stillness reveals a lot about us to us, and in the moments of stillness, the gratitude finds its way into our lives.

3. Training our subconscious to say ‘Thanks’ - Thanks has become very uncommon these days. Even though that is one of the magic words that we learnt in our formative years, we easily give in to the racing moments and glide past them without mouthing thank you. The above two practices will make it easier to say thanks more consciously. Starting to say thanks to all the moments of joy will automatically get into our subconscious. 

What do we get out of it?

• Activates the law of attraction—if a deeper sense of contentment is the outcome of believing and practicing in gratitude, we are also increasing the chances for the universe to throw in more such moments on our way to being grateful about.

• Happy brain = optimal functioning brain—studies say that the ones who regularly show gratitude show greater neural sensitivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with learning and decision-making (Ref: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_changes_you_and_your_brain).) , This tells us that being grateful has lasting effects on our brain.

Summing up: 

Slowing down the chase and reflecting on the moments help in grounding us to the present - the space where we all feel connected to the higher self. 

A Nosalgic drive to my Chawl

“Amma, it feels like you have put on the AC. Air has grown cold”, said my 7-year-old lifting up her beady eyes from her maths homework. A cheery hurray followed.

I shook the clothes firmly and filed them neatly on the cloth stand. Yes, indeed. There was a light nip in the air. Not due to AC. And, certainly no change in the temperature. It was still a blazing 38 degrees outside.

I smiled and was whisked off to my childhood days. To my nondescript haven that would have looked more picturesque in a child’s sketchbook than in reality. A chawl which housed 14 flats adjacent to each other, spaced out at an arm’s length. A place where people were knitted closely together regardless of what social standing they were in. A place where we children had not one but many houses at our perusal to watch television, eat lunch, sleep under the warm covers and take refuge from the angry monsoon spells. A place where aimless wanderings were honoured but not bothered by ruthless meanderings of the routine. A place where mothers were not tired of cooking even if the sneaky rats were merciless and snuck out of nowhere to have a first bite every time the hot rotis came off the stove. A place where our father made sandwiches on Sundays and the screentime meant watching the DD channel together with family.  A place where childhood was all about playing ghar-ghar in our 4-foot muddy verandas and tucking the grownup’s bags in our shoulders to play office-office near the community tap with its noisy sigh playing on the background. Where playing outdoors was our only agenda. Going to a road was one fence-jump away. A place where we were young, scatterbrained and unsure of ourselves but our sledge-hammered conviction of becoming like our 20-year-old neighbourhood didi was palpable. Where in monsoons we made our aquifers using the gravels and rocks and made pools for the crafty crabs to swim over but a few stray ones bathed in puddles were swiped off by the neighbours and became their delectable dinners. Also, the muddy puddles played out as river in disguise for our Dongar ki paani game. Where failings and foibles of mankind lay far off from our sights and air was heavily drunk on love and little joys.

I stood rooted to the spot, my reverie still unbroken.  The memories fleetingly dislodged from the recesses of my mind as my daughter’s eyes hungrily looked on, waiting with bated breath, for I started regaling the reminiscence of my bygone but never-to-be-forgotten tales. Fleeting as they were but even in its fleetingness, some memories stayed deeply etched and memorable. Like author Ruskin Bond, the boy from the hills did say, “Childhood memories linger forever”, it is undeniably true to the word.

Every nook and cranny of the horizontally expansive chawl was home to me. The more I blink back my tears that gush in remembrance of the place I grew up, the more I think of it. And withdrawing all restraint, I allow my tears to flow down in gay abandon. The atmosphere grows even more cooler. “Kavita”, a whisper gets out in the loose, and slowly prisoned feelings break the invisible chains and an inexplicable feeling tugs the heart. My daughter arches her eyebrows and ponders at the moniker that comes out of my lips.  

Kavita was my close friend. We never had friendship tags at that time. A friend was a good or close friend and never graduated to bestie, best friend forever, Bae or Bro etc. We were far-off neighbours, 10 flats away but intimate friends.  Kavita stayed in the last flat number, which lay at the turning of our chawl and lived cheek-by-jowl with the neighbourhood chawl.  Eldest among the three, there hung a heavy weight of responsibilities on her shoulder and the furrowed lines on her forehead were the proof of it. Theirs was a vulnerable, low-income family which struggled to make ends meet. Kavita’s house was often my respite and refuge. A shelter to run under avoiding one too many whacks and angry scowls of my mother. She was also the first one to introduce me to the game of stones which we children took pleasure in playing. A simple game with a few smooth-skinned stones was our everyday game. Hardly we knew that it also promoted hand-eye coordination, one of the key milestones in children. I got the hang of the game yet it was not easy when Kavita was part of the game.  She, with her sharp, superior eye, was always the winner of the game.

One sultry afternoon, I was at Kavita’s house waiting ardently for her to join me in the play of stones. That day, I felt like I was an intruder that came in her and her toil’s way. The blistering sun beat on her back yet she drew out the soiled utensils and sat on her hunches to wash them in the scorching tap water. I held my gaze on her when after washing the utensils clean, she dipped a rag cloth in cool water and started to run it on the floor. In an instant, a child in Kavita grew up and became a domestic goddess. Her conversations with me did not stop all this while and her dexterity in handling household chores marvelled me. She chatted with all honesty, doing justice to her friendship as well as guiding her hands to finish her worldly duties. The sweltering tiles of the roof of our chawl sent all our efforts to keep us cool down the drain. Yet Kavita had a secret magic wand. She pulled all the rag clothes, ran them in tap water, wrung them to remove excess water, and hung them in a neat line. The occasional breeze brought in the coolness of the clothes along with it, casting a pleasant spell on us. We sat at the threshold of her house and savoured the cool breeze that tickled our faces. The failings and foibles of life forgotten; we inhaled the lingering fragrance of the innocent little joys. Kavita found a solution to the sunny days. Much to my delight, she gifted me a life lesson. She did not have any comfort to her name yet she found a way to be comfortable. She had enough reasons to crib but she chose to make do with what she had, turn her life around and see a ray of sunshine in all her adversities. Kavita was a giant wave that chugged wavelets of challenges with unwavering spirit.

I don’t know the whereabouts of Kavita. We drifted apart, each with their priorities. Yet in the unknown, there is some sort of sweet joy. Just like Ruskin Bond in the Night Train of Deoli did not alight the train to connect to his past and wished it was better off not knowing the unknown so that the image that we brew in our minds of our past lies undiluted. What I know is today after all these years, my present is deeply entangled with the past. Sometimes it is difficult to prise apart the present from the past because they look identical to each other. Just like today, the whiff of cool air coming off from the wet clothes put me on the same threshold that I was decades before with my good friend Kavita.

 

Positivity in Tee: Reading between the Errands

 

You cannot run from positive affirmations even if you think you have run out of them.  They will come, looking for you. All you have to do is keep your eyes wide open and graciously receive them with warmth and care. They can come to you at any moment and from any quarter perhaps, while running errands like when the momentum has picked up in you to array the disarray in your child’s wardrobe. When that happens, you treat them as a little note, an epiphany or a sacred sign from the universe and insert them as a key that locks itself into your mind with an audible click, only to unlock a change in you and get reflected in every journey you embark. When your little one’s Tees mouth affirmations, you cannot just run away without glancing at it.

Start small, dream big, repeat – Starting small and repeating them with consistency is so underrated these days. So much of today’s world is rooted in instant gratifications and making it big in a wink of time. Small, incremental progress is the first step to be driven in the dream/goal that you have envisioned or set. 15 minutes of walking as against to one hour is acceptable if you are starting. It is the thought of walking that counts. Like it says in Three Men in the Boat – “You start on Monday with an idea implanted in your bosom that you are going to enjoy yourself”, it is a must to start with a note of affirming joy, however small it looks at present. The small baby steps to attain your big dream and including them in your routine in a way that it becomes part of your lifestyle is a major win, isn’t it?

Take care of nature. You are part of it – Indeed. So much of us is rooted in nature that we melt in its vast expanse. When we think of it as a separate entity, the idea to destroy it or use its resources to satisfy our greed and desires arises. From the ground we come, In the ground we go, rest all is smoke. In words spoken by a mystic Baba Farid, Do not despise the Earth, though you tread it underfoot. When you pass away, the Earth on you, they will put. Talk to the plants, nurture them like a child and see what you yield from it.

The most amazing friend ever is you – Yes, you heard it right. You are your constant. No one can replace you. Be in love with you, befriend your moods and emotions, and understand your temperament so that you can understand the world better. Whenever you are in the self-trash talk spell, you get to know one thing - while everything starts to blur, what doesn’t fade but steadily stands beside you is ‘You’. You are there to hold yourself, your hand is there to caress you and your talk can bring back your shrunken self who has gone down in the dumps to level up and swell back to the positive self. When the narrative has gone bad and your subconscious mind is repeating the same in the loop, you stir the pot of hope that is tucked in your heart and tap into its frugal reserves.

Happiness is loading …please wait – Happiness is loading. You have to be patient. You need to work out different things that make you happy. You need to load your life with a set of activities that will eventually give you sustainable joy. Maybe that is why it is called, it is happiness in the form of varied activities and things you do is loading. And when it comes to sustainability, you need consistency and patience. So keep at it.

Smile and keep the young voyager alive – Smile and be curious like a child who knows the power of now. You don’t need fancy frills but what you need is a traveller’s temperament and childlike keen eyes to help you be in the present – the only reality that snatches from your psychological clock that revolves around past and future.  

Dance it out, babe – Exactly, movement resuscitates the bereaved soul like no other. Feel the joy in dancing it out. When Lord Shiva used to feel all sorts of big feelings, he launched into different forms of dance. Bring out your inner Shiva and dance the worries away.

 

 

Tathastu and the Unsung She-roes in my Travels

 

I just finished reading the beautiful book ‘Tathastu’– the lovely short stories that are more like reminders, the motivating sentiments that one has forgotten and should be mindful of. First of all, I found it hard to believe that it is the debut work of the author and she has made a write-up that is an extension to her blog. One is because of the words, the articulation, and the anecdotes linking to the messages she needs to pass on to the readers. The second thing is the clarity of her thought process. All these stories are quite catchy, not too long and worth reading aloud to your friends and family.

I cannot tear apart one story and say it is my favourite as I loved all of them. Some stories are rich in sentiments, some have resplendent settings, and some fit in as positive affirmations that will set you up or propel you to move forward with confidence. The characters in the stories are quite relatable. It is like you know these people and in some or other way, have come in close contact with them in your real life.

One of the stories that I connected so well, thanks to my travels that holds ground for this text-to-life connection, is ‘Have or Have-not’. It is the story of a tea-picker Selvi who doesn’t mind torrents or merciless sun, keeps her chin up and works like there would be no tomorrow. Unfazed by the biting cold, she stands in the tea-picking record check line with a smile on her face. Her cheerful demeanour is not only unmistakable but even sprouts inspiration for others. For the outsiders, her life is laid in thorns but she thinks otherwise. She reminds us that have and have-not is a state of mind. There are always more perspectives on a situation – For selvi, this is life and her life is good, if not better with monthly catch-ups on movies, friendly repartee and banter with her work friends, and waking up to face each day with a smile. What spoke volumes in Selvi’s words was gratitude for the have’s and least consideration for the have-nots.

This brings me to my own personal experiences with the strangers that I met at random in two of my travels. The owner lady of Maggi Point in Mussoorie during the visit to George Everest’s house is so relatable to Selvi in the book. With kindness overload, she was happy sprinkling a 2-minute charm on tourists’ plates. We had our tummy filled with delicious noodles and we were all set for our next stop at Cloud’s end. But by universe’s decree, we were kept on hold in her shop for 30-odd minutes or so. Our chauffeur was out of sight and my husband went after him. With zero network, it was quite a task to trace him. That gave me and my daughter to stop at this point and dig deeper into the local’s lives.  Her pleasant smile was very welcoming and that nudged me to ask her about her life, her journey and whether the business is flourishing. She had zero qualms about her life and was happy in her own world. Yes, monsoons were difficult to fetch stuff from far-off cities, to stock up things for her shop, and those stubborn hill-side blood-thirsty leeches gave her a hard time. But these were part and parcel of her life.  Her entire life’s worth of happiness was tucked in these 2-minute noodles. She was happy to serve pasta to my daughter while my husband was busy digging up the whereabouts of the cab driver. In the meantime,  I caught up on a glassful of chai and invaluable life lessons of being happy and content at the spot you are placed.

On my recent trip, I interacted with a sweeper lady on our hotel property. She was sweeping the lawns and the stone staircases and keeping the place and alleys in order. Her commute time was an hour from her house and it was not very conducive in the evening to walk all the way to her house, given the unpaved roads, poor performance of streetlights on a few roads and no streetlights on others. In spite of all these, she pulled off a smiling face and was working with an inaudible happy hum that attracted me to speak to her. She said in Hindi, “Kya kare, Kaam toh karna hi hai” – which hit the nail on the wall, calling spade a spade, in so many words. Meaning life is like this, you have to work no matter what challenges you encounter. You can choose to crib or make the path a little easier by focusing on the small joys. She brings lunch from home and sometimes, she gets to eat from the hotel’s kitchen which she finds something to be cheered about.

It is easier to leave and walk out when times are tough but humongously difficult to be rooted, work and bloom amidst them. These unsung she-roes’ lives are driving forces for us humans to be mindful of the joys that come in varying degrees and show indomitable spirit in the work we are doing.

 

Schedule joy: A Crucial Tip That Kept Me Sane

 

Though there are self-care practitioners, influencers and life coach who practice and encourage people to practice self-care, we don’t practice it ourselves until there is a severe push or introspection. The precursor to start a habit is always our own willingness to practice it. We should fully be consumed with the idea to be able to produce it in full force. You must have heard buy first, pay later. Here also you need to buy the idea of the habit first but the difference is once the habit is formed and sustains in your routine, you are getting paid by its multi-fold benefits.

My cousin and I had a conversation just recently when he was in India. A chance question sent me on the lane of introspection. I was absently gazing at nothingness when he asked me mainly because I was not able to produce a suitable reply. Firstly, I stared in disbelief for the question was unusual and secondly that made me go inward to seek answer and put forth as a justified reply.

A simple question it was - “How do you chill?”  Since often times we dwell on our busy rigmarole, we hardly pay attention to the joy element that is so crucial part of our day. We do not plan on investing few minutes for it but whine about not getting enough time for it. Our lamentations reverbrate on every meetup we do with our friends over happy hours.

As much as we love to talk about our busy schedules and unending deadlines and also pay heed to other’s tremors of everyday routine, we despise people taking time away from their hectic schedules to tend to the invisible wounds and scars that this hectic life casts. We smirk on seeing people hanging out with their friends on weekdays, walking or exercising on a park, catching up on a music concert on a Monday or just sitting with a book on their balcony. We belittle their lives and take pride on the workhorse that we have become. Do not be surprised. We all have that person in us who constantly sends reminders to complete deadlines, contributes a little extra in office meetings, and drowns in work environment even on weekends. As charged, I am guilty. I, too, have that person within me who has recently become a significant part of me. So when that question was posed to me, I did some introspection.

And coincidentally, I chanced upon a newsletter of an influencer and a noted chef and nutrition expert. Her newsletter always gave me reasons to smile and she kept the tone so lighthearted and easy that 45 seconds into it, she had your full attention.

Schedule joy was her headline and she had listed the activities that gave her joy. We all like to fill our calendars with office meeting, presentation time, school ptm schedules, and other million crucial aspects of our life. Have we scheduled joy anytime? Sounds too vain, isn’t it? There are no plausible reasons one could gather that could justify to fill calendar with such trifling thing. The joy that we do not place in our calendar yet that is the important thing we chase. We have prioritised it throughout our lives, but only to be experienced in the future. Do we make time for happiness? We do, indeed. However, in the future.

Instead of putting it out there as a phenomenon or an enigma, or a force to be reckoned only tomorrow, why not insert it in our daily routine. And that exactly I exercised which became my answer to my cousin’s question. I scheduled one fun activity in my everyday calendar. I took time consciously for it and dipped myself to heart’s content. Sometime it was 10 minutes-walk with my daughter. Sometimes just reading few pages from the book or sometimes listening to the music in loop.

And, for the past month, I've felt sane amidst the daily rigmarole thanks to this rejuvenating microbreak in my daily routine.

Summing up…

Some days make you cow down to their demands, while others shrink under your steely gaze, and that's okay; that's exactly how life will be. What you can do is schedule little fun elements in your calendar and sprinkle them throughout your hectic schedule to keep the flow and your mental health in check.

Book review - Before the Coffee gets cold

 

What would you do if you had the opportunity to go back in time? To unravel the mystery and know answers to hidden puzzles. And if you are provided with such a chance to retrace your steps and set your footprints on the exact path you have travelled on, would you grab such an offer? Isn't this deal too alluring to pass up?

Set in Tokyo, in an unassuming café dated more than a century of history with nondescript but eccentric décor that saw hardly any upgradation in all these years, is a story of bunch of characters. The windowless underground café is awash with sepia glow from the overhead lights that hang above the tables. These characters have nothing in common but what ties them is one ardent yearning to engage with the past. The secret tremors in each of their hearts become so unbearable that they shake them and throw them in a whirlpool. Every suck and pull makes them more distant from their own selves. When they are at the end of their tethers, this café pulls them from the swirling current and breathes life into them. The yearning to revisit the past is fulfilled by the café but the conditions are too many. Even readers will feel overwhelmed hearing about the rules that has reigned in the café since time immemorial. Which makes us believe that there is nothing called free lunch. You should be open to stick to these rules and unless you do that, you won’t succeed in your journey of past discovery and resolution. But these characters relent in their promises and thus, a new portal gets opened in front of them. That’s not it. The café’s most abominable rule is you cannot change the present. Yeah the baffling twist.

The book gives us a glimpse of each of their lives, their past and the point in which they all stand now. The characters are flawed but they make a steady progress to set their flaws right. Bridging the gap between past and present is what you can draw out from this book. Meaning we all live or have lived in a space between ‘what could have been’ and ‘ what actually is’. A simmering tension exists in this space where we are attacked with unknown demons. Similarly, the characters, straddling between both the worlds, are confronted with unknown demons and try to seek resolution. The café offers them (in each story) an opportunity to cement that gap and helps them to accept the ‘what actually is’. You cannot change the outcome but at least make peace with the knowledge by knowing the reason why it happened.  For some, letting go is an only option, for some knowing the truth behind the indifference, and for some, a chance to reunite with their families. Towards the end, the tightness in the chests of the characters are reduced to bare minimum.

Though the story has umpteen number of rules, I mean, very difficult to catch up; all the sub-stories have different plots, which is a clean win for this book. I personally loved the story of sisters and the one with husband and wife.

While I was reading this novel, I chanced into one article that came in The Newyorker online Magazine. The piece was very much inching towards these lines. The uncanny allure of our unled lives is so attractive and flashy at times that we stop find meaning in the present. We find peace in dwelling in the regrets that present pleasantness pales in comparison. We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

Even though this ‘what could have been’ has its own allure and charm to it and as the article puts it ‘we clamber up into our future thinking back on the ladders unclimbed, it is just a fantasy or a fiction that we plot in our heads. It might be beautiful in our heads but we should be thankful enough that we are spared by the ignorance. What if that ‘could have been’ area was a trap and our present life has saved us from that trap.

Travelling - An underrated educational course

 

Travelling is by far the most underrated educational course I believe. So many learnings it imparts, and the empathy it rekindles in us. The empathy for other cultures, societal notions and people’s beliefs. All-encompassing and wholesome.

We recently travelled to Hyderabad, the city of Pearl and I was pleasantly astonished at its history and culture. Mainly because the city has still retained its historical significance and every pillar and rock breathes and cherishes its value. For the uninitiated, Hyderabad boasts of Charminar, Hussain Sagar Lake, Salar Jung Museum and Golconda; the old and eternal gems. And Ramoji is a whiff of fresh air that combines modern-day filmmaking techniques with its stretches, winding lanes and palatial parks that have been home to some 5000-odd films. We spoke to some of the locals who are living here for aeons and the freshness and raw emotions that they gather when speaking about this city, their city, is phenomenal. I was overwhelmed and choked up by the liberty that these people took in regard to this city and that clearly reinstated the belief in me that you are every inch weaved to the vein of the city that made you what you are now. But not to forget that these people are from the generation that placed the city’s name as a prefix to their name.

And here we are, chiselled to find ourselves in the places we hop. We are straddling between modern and old. With times pacing rapidly, we want to tie ourselves with new technology but still, we have some part of us that tether strongly to the old and past. As much as we love to surround ourselves with modern amenities, we want to resurrect the old way of living and juxtapose it with the new to find a balance. Our generation is trying to find a space in this transition, on this cusp. To create something of our own and to live off of the charity of the old is indeed not very easy. We are trying to find semblance in the middle.

And what better than travelling to open our eyes to see the world that we left behind, the world that is still promising and has a lot to offer?