Quotes Tagged "life-lessons"
Whatever be your current reality, you are never in conflict with it. Life is happening to you. And you are going with the flow. A health challenge, a break-up, the loss of a loved one, a career-related complication, a messy financial situation, whatever you are dealing with, you are doing pretty fine living with what is. However, the moment your mind plays up an expectation that your Life must be different from what it is now, suffering kicks in. So, clearly, suffering comes from expectations. And you cause your expectations. The solution, therefore, to avoid suffering is to drop all expectations. Embrace your current reality, do what you can do in the given context and keep moving…
Life serves us all wake-up calls at different times. Through experiences, events, conversations. You can surely turn off the alarm clock and go back to sleep, which is you can ignore the call, but you can’t deny that it is time you woke up. What is interesting is that if you don’t heed the wake-up call the first time, Life will come back and knock you on your head again and again. It is your choice to process that stimuli or not that makes all the difference.
Life is eventually about things, people, relationships, projects, opportunities money, health and even memories - all of them being taken away from you! Life is about constantly embracing new normals, it is about finding meaning, Purpose, beauty and Happiness in what is!
When your work becomes your prayer, Life becomes meaningful. We are conditioned to imagine that work is a means to earn a living. But what if you made your work the reason why you live, the raison d’etre for your Happiness, for your living? Think: how happy you possibly can be when what you do every day is your prayer, your selfless offering to a Higher Energy, to the creator. Simply, instead of making money the object, make your work your prayer and strive for world-class excellence…money, over time, will eventually flow to you, just as everything you need will!
When you are wronged by someone, you have two options: either fight back or walk away. Now, if you can forgive and move on, walk way. But if you will grieve and suffer forever that feeling of having been violated and short-changed, fight. But don’t fight if it will make you wallow in a maze of debilitating emotions – anger, grief, fear, insecurity, worry, hatred…such a fight that drains you of all your goodness, and which leaves you cold and numb, is simply not worth it. But if you don’t fight the good fight, understandably, the cause will be lost. And that’s sacrilege. So, the key is to practice detached determination. Fight with focus and strategy and fight calmly, happily! Fight with detachment – don’t cling on to your desired outcomes, don’t set deadlines. Simply fight. When you fight the good fight, with equanimity and a sense of Purpose, the outcome never matters. The fact that you stood up and fought does.
Being happy professionally is really the ability to do what you love doing the way you want to do it. Which is, if you have a natural talent and you have honed it to a world-class standard, you want the creative and professional space to express this talent your way. However, because your customers – both paying customers and society at large – want to control what they want from you, there may be times when you feel suffocated and unhappy. Ask yourself: is it worth doing something for money or social acclaim/validation at the cost of your inner peace or Happiness? If the answer to this question is ‘no’ – choose to be ‘humbly ruthless’. Be unflinching and non-negotiable on your professional and creative standards. Yet take that position with all humility, knowing fully well that someone else may fulfil that need for your customer should you opt out. Surprisingly though, 9 times out of 10, people may come back and work with you. The one deal that breaks off may have never made you happy; so, really, no sweat there! This is the key to Happiness – being ‘humbly ruthless’!
Apna Time Ayega’ is perhaps a way to console yourself when you don’t get what you want but you see all others around you getting ‘success, fame and money’. But wait! What’s wrong with having to toil longer for what you want and experience delays and denials while honing your creativity, your skills and your art? What is wrong with enjoying the process of doing what makes you come alive? Actually, it is this process, this journey, that counts more than arriving at some place, proving to someone or getting something! There is no right time in the future. This moment, now, this is the only time you have – because the past is dead and the future is not yet born. This is always the right time. So, instead of sighing and saying ‘Apna Time Ayega’, flip the paradigm, say: ‘Yehi Hai Right Time, Baby!
When you are confronted with many problems at the same time, don’t be overwhelmed or emotional and attempt to solve all of them at the same time. You simply can’t. Approach your problems with basic project management skills. Sort your problems into different buckets: A. which ones cannot be solved ever B. which ones cannot be solved by you C. which ones can be solved by you over time and D. which ones can be solved by you immediately? Obviously, go to work today on bucket D, while planning to schedule time and collaborations to address buckets C and B. Of course, learn to accept those in bucket A with humility and equanimity and move on. This is the only way you can focus sharply, be calm and find strength in a storm and be happy!
When you wish pain and suffering on someone who wronged you, what is actually happening is that you are still cooking within yourself. You are the one who is suffering. And you are expressing this suffering by wishing that your perpetrator must also suffer. Now, this reaction is normal; it is human to feel this way. But if you pause and reflect quietly, you will see the futility of causing your own suffering. If you must fight your perpetrator legally, do that. But do that dispassionately, without acrimony; let it simply be a clinical process. You don’t have to even forgive the person if you really are not feeling like it yet. But stop wishing that they suffer. That’s a big step forward in your own healing. When you take this step, over time, you will realize that Life always serves retribution at its own pace and that nothing liberates you as much as forgiveness does!
It's better to be realistic and come out of the virtual world, social media pushups. The moment you do this. you will come to acknowledge the worthly connections of your life
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