deepcontemplator

thinking deeply about things that matter

Tag: selfdev

  • How to think about art

    It might be tempting to look at analyses of books, movies or any other work of art. This is specially useful as sometimes art can feel so esoteric so you want to understand what the whole noise is about!

    With Internet, there are a range of analysis videos now, which delve from the superficial to deep psychological or creative aspects.

    The existence of these analyses are definitely a blessing. It can sometimes give us a framework, or direction to think about when thinking about art.

    For example, a book analysis can throw light on the motivations of the characters, the sequences and the general message or theme. It is possible to read the entire book and miss the whole point!

    However, any art, according to me is also a personal story. The meaning of which is for you to interpret.

    It can differ from person to person, and with time, the way someone views a piece of art can differ even for the same person.

    While its helpful to rely on experts to understand how to look at art, our goal should be to build that muscle ourselves. Even with a book, it is useful at different points along the story to check with ourselves what we feel the theme or what the author is trying to convey.

    Then we can always look up online as to how other people have different interpretations of the same book.

    But eventually we need to find the meaning which resonates with us the most, based on our journey and experiences.

  • Who are you in competition with?

    Knowingly or unknowingly we can sometimes fall into the trap of competing with others. Maybe when someone casually mentions they travel at least once a month, we take it as our own goal. Or we start following someone’s lifestyle of excessive workouts and try to live up to their definition of a good workout.

    As long as you are conscious about the competitiveness, or about you falling into the FOMO (fear of missing out) trap, its okay. You know what you are getting into! 😉

    Many times it’s so subtle that we lose track of our selves and what we want to do with our lives.

    How we wish to spend our time, energy and money.

    A more fulfilling approach according to me, is to spend the time and effort to understand what really matters to you.

    What your purpose in life is, what your values are and what energizes you.

    You can then do an audit if you are spending your time, energy and money in line with what matters to you, according to you.

    You can see the areas where you are just following someone which is taking away from the things which actually matter to you. And once you have this clarity, you can go out and find your community.

    Finding a bunch of people with the same interests as you can be fun and gives a sense of community, You could also indulge in ‘healthy’ competition sometimes so that all of you get a boost towards your goals.

    So the next time you wish you had some activity or item someone has, take a pause. Think why this thing feels so attractive to you. Maybe its really something you wish for, or maybe its just the way someone is projecting it which makes want to have it as well.

  • Be generative

    Be generative

    In the current times, it can be so easy to passively live away your life consuming content. There is nothing wrong with this. However to achieve anything worthwhile, you need to assimilate and integrate your learning and lived experience and generate energy, ideas and work from it.

    Being generative and producing work performs many functions –

    You find your voice

    Actually going and doing something consistently helps you discover your voice. Constantly putting yourself out there signals to yourself that you matter and your ideas matter.

    You build the momentum of creation

    By forcing yourself to be generative, you are constantly looking for ideas which you can use and bring to fruition. This builds on itself and creates momentum to sustain and grow further.

    Its a way to teach yourself

    Its always said that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone. By teaching someone, and in the process generating words, notes, conversations puts into test how much you have understood the topic.

    It might be one thing to abstractly understand algorithms, but actually writing it down and explaining it step by step to someone and convincing them why it works is totally different.

    So go ahead and weave in moments of being generative along with learning and growth.

  • Word of the month – advocate

    Word of the month – advocate

    advocate (v) – to speak in support of an idea or course of action

    The past month I was thinking of how advocating for what you believe in and stand for is so important. It might come naturally for a few of us, and for others it might be tough to build this skill.

    We might find it easier to advocate for someone or rally for a cause someone else starts fighting for. You might find it comfortable to hop on a bus which someone else is already steering.

    However, we get the most scared when it comes to advocating for ourselves.

    And we matter. Our ideas matter.

    At times, it might be us who needs an advocate the most.

    To be able to advocate for oneself, we firstly need to be clear on what matters to us. It takes reflection, questioning and self awareness to understand our own core values and beliefs.

    If you are prone to self doubt and low self esteem, it might be particularly hard to self advocate and drive results in the direction which best suits us.

    The journey of self advocating is bound to have failures, embarrassment and disappointments. Just accepting this can make us more resilient and realistic about the effort involved.

    We need to slowly and compassionately persist.

    Consistently stand up for ourselves and what we believe in, and how we view the world. Having allies and learning from people who are good at advocating for themselves will be helpful.

    In the end, we owe it to ourselves to make us and our ideas be heard and seen in the way we deem fit and right for us.

  • Striving vs living – finding the balance

    Striving vs living – finding the balance

    It can be sometimes be addictive to keep working on ourselves and strive to be a better version. Never living the life which we currently have as a result.

    It is important to be aware of areas where we need work. Where there is room for growth. And we can consistently work on these aspects.

    However, we should not forget to live the life we already have, as we strive to be better.

    It is a delicate balance.

    On the one hand you are fully aware of your challenges and rough edges. On the other, you fully embrace your present self providing yourself validation and compassion.

    In present times, its easy to fall into the trap of constant striving. There are many signals from media, society hammered into us on how we are not smart, beautiful or social enough. Many of them are based on completely false narratives, but its a hard task to avoid this constant humdrum.

    So remember to live your life completely even as you continue on your growth journey. .

  • The limits of to do lists and planners

    The limits of to do lists and planners

    There is the oft quoted
    Failing to plan is planning to fail

    So we end up planning our days by the minute with things to do. There are many apps and planners which help you do this (to the extreme sometimes). You are asked at the start of the year/month/week to meticulously plan ahead, tack your daily habits like water intake, reading, watching shows and all. In return, at least implicitly, the promise is that by becoming an ultimate task slayer, you become a happier person.

    I have had my trysts and multiple false starts with such planning apps and planners. You firstly spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect app or planner which is customized to you. Sad news is – there are none which will perfectly fit you. There are many apps though which can work for you. 

    The important aspect however is how much pay off can you expect from tracking your days as a series of To Dos.

    As with many things in life, we go through seasons and cycles. There might be times when you are in the productivity mode and the whole month is filled with ticking off items on your to do list. Then there are extended periods of slump, where maybe you get 2-3 things done in the entire week. And that is okay.

    We do not have to be chained to never ending to do lists. 

    Our worth is not determined by how long the to do list is or how many items we are able to tick off.

    My experience with planners have been lackluster to say the least. I realized I am better off without them, and a simple to do list for the week, quarter, year suffices and mostly gets the job done.

    However, like any other tool in your life, be open to trying something new. Something which probably can make your life simpler. If it works for you, adopt it, even in a big way maybe!

    But the tool should not become an end in itself. Its a mean to achieve something greater. Definitely there are many worthwhile and important things in life, which you go ahead and do anyway, and may not figure in your to do list!

  • How to be less uptight

    How to be less uptight

    You want to things to be always prim and proper. With proper decorum. You get frustrated with minor inconveniences. Life problems can be stressful to handle at the best.

    The truth however is that life’s difficulties touches everyone in their lifetime. Isn’t the whole growing up, being mature, about being more resilient when life happens.

    1. Understand that things go wrong (and more often than you think)
      Even with best intentions, best plans, sometimes you get punched in the face. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you are a failure. It doesn’t mean everyone around is constantly judging you. When things don’t go as expected, accept it, and continue anyway.
    2. Its not your responsibility
      Yes, most things you are fretting about, let go. They are not your responsibility. Unless you are fully responsible of taking care of another living entity, like a child, pet or someone sick. You don’t need to get the house in order before guests visit, you are not responsible for always having to put up a cheerful and happy persona. You are allowed to have human emotions, and its healthy to show them in a safe space.
      So stop taking blame and apologizing for everything which goes wrong.
    3. Learn to be adaptable
      Things keep changing all the time. Try to be as adaptable and accommodating as you can. If any situation or person does expose your rough edges, give yourself enough grace and compassion to fully accept it. Think about how you can learn more about the situation and react better next time.
    4. Read, travel, meet people
      Learn, interact (and live their life vicariously via fiction) with people different from you. You learn how things go bad even with the ‘perfect’ people or circumstance. The more you can expand your worldview, the softer you become to yourself and those around you.
    5. Understand the finitude of life
      After all, an average person has around four thousand weeks in a lifetime! So is it really worth worrying and stressing about how the waiter irresponsibly doused a whole glass of mango milkshake on you.
      Many a times, its best to be just amused on how life can be so unpredictable and in the most random ways.
    Laugh at the minor misfortunes and live beautifully anyway.
  • How dance has helped me

    How dance has helped me

    A flyer pasted on my dance class notice board had in bold colorful lettering

    ‘Why do you dance? What do you feel when you dance?’ and the like.

    It was amusing when I saw it first, but I keep coming back to those questions every now and then. I used to learn dance over the weekends for close to three years and it has been more than a couple of years now since I returned. So it took some remembering when someone recently asked how dance has impacted me.

    Everyone’s journey in dance is different and so are its benefits. However for me the benefits have been clear as before –

    You learn how to hold yourself

    It can sound pretty basic. But any activity which increases body awareness, like dance, or yoga, makes you more conscious of your body structure and posture. By learning complex movements, you realize how effortful or effortless something can be. All this increased awareness just lets you have a better poise and presence.

    You get comfortable with falling (even literally)

    We used to try inversions like handstands, cart wheels every now and then. And for a beginner that just means lot of falling rather than doing an actual cartwheel.

    And then days, or weeks later you finally get hold of it and learn to do it with less thought. So you need to be ready to keep falling and failing repeatedly and trying regardless.

    It becomes easier to put yourself out there

    Any performance art entails showing up fully as yourself and willing to be seen. Doing more of it makes you slightly more comfortable to be in the spotlight.

    Seeing others on stage and the vulnerability which accompanies that can be greatly comforting. It can compel you to show up in your full glory as well.

    You get out of your head

    Dance can become an intense physical activity which you can’t intellectually force. Many a times a movement which seems simple can be so difficult to execute. You then understand that you need to stop overthinking it, and just enjoy and stay with the process. Eventually the movement will distill to your body.

    There are obvious physical, and mental fitness benefits from having a steady dance practice. But the advantages can be much more.

    Every time I go to a dance class, there is something new I learn about myself.
  • Time is a container

    Time is a container

    Time feels so real and yet fleeting at the same time. Usually it feels as though we have an unlimited supply of it. However, all of us need to work with this rigid container of twenty four hours in a day.

    There is a lot of pressure to maximize the output from this container. The loud productivity brigade calls us to extract the most from limited time. Thankfully for us, we have books like Four Thousand Weeks which have established how getting on to a productivity treadmill is a futile endeavor.

    Like many other things in life, your relationship with time gets better once you let go of your desire to control it tightly.

    Recently I came across this insightful podcast episode featuring Laura Vanderkam, the author of the book Tranquility by Tuesday. It is filled with great, easy to apply steps which can help you get a better hold of our never-failing-to-overwhelm-life.

    The author gives us a simple tip on how to work with this container – time.

    Have a set bedtime!

    It can be easy to believe that we can extend our supply of time by forgoing our rest or leisure time seeping into our sleep. Revenge bedtime procrastination is becoming more common now – a long tiring day would drag well past midnight with scrolling through Instagram or watching Youtube.

    Of course this means that you don’t feel your best the next day, as you still need to wake up on time to get on with your day.

    I have started to apply this principle, and honestly am quite surprised how a simple change can improve your overall wellbeing. Having a set bedtime ensures I put myself to sleep around that time. Even if I stretch by twenty or thirty minutes, I am somewhat clearly aware of how this will impact my energy the next day.

    Earlier it felt like it was my right to continue entertaining myself well into the night, because I have had a tiring/boring/exciting/<insert any emotion> day. But now you understand how delaying bedtime can impact you.

    Eventually you feel indebted to your future self and go to bed early! At a time you had chosen for yourself.

  • Living gracefully

    Living gracefully

    Life is hard.

    Many a times you will get punched in the face when you are least expecting it.

    But what matters is how you are able to dust off the sand and get back up again. Get back to what you were doing. With better understanding perhaps, but you persist.

    Much is spoken about grit, in this post I want to talk about grace.

    One of the definitions of Grace is
    “elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action”

    I refer to grace here in a much wider sense. Its your ability to put a persistent and smiling face after a setback. (Or maybe you really want to sob loudly, which is okay too!)

    You fully understand that you have failed at something, maybe even miserably. But you allow yourself enough grace and self compassion to continue with renewed energy and strength.

    At some point or other, everyone messes up. Or things might be totally out of our control and maybe luck didn’t favor us well. However that doesn’t mean we need to wallow in self loathe and beat ourselves up.

    You acknowledge the reality, get back to business, one step at a time, gracefully. 🙂