Energy management

 Energy - the word, the feeling, the concept that I'm super curious about.

Spend an hour with a person who laughs, smiles, exudes a lot of love, actively listens and shares interesting insights, and shows mutual respect for everyone and everything - you feel energized at the end of the hour.

Spend 15 minutes with a person who criticizes you for who you are, blames everyone and everything, has a grumpy face, feels entitled, and is egoistic - your energy is zapped within a few minutes of interacting with such a person.

Our energies not only get impacted by others in our day-to-day interactions but also by our thoughts, words, and actions. For the past couple of days, I felt exhausted and drained. My quick energy charger is to go for a walk on the terrace, but the continuous rains spoiled all chances to step outside my home. Instead of resisting the feeling, I accepted that I was low on energy and took it easy.

As I woke up this morning, I felt a sudden rush of energy through my nerves. It felt like my battery got fully charged after a good night's sleep. My mind was racing with a bunch of todos to complete. My hands were busy, cooking breakfast and lunch, multitasking with all three stove burners ON. As I was quickly chopping a raw banana into small cubes for a dry curry, I accidentally cut my left thumb with a sharp knife. Blood was oozing out, it was a deep cut. I washed my hand a few times and then K helped me with a band-aid. I sat down for a few minutes and took a few deep breaths.

As I pondered over what happened, I realized that there was no need for me to rush through this morning. I could have sat down for a few minutes and jotted down all thoughts and todos rushing into my mind (thought dump technique).

After slowly winding up the remaining kitchen work, I ate my breakfast and then did a 30-minute guided meditation. It felt so relaxing and I could feel that my mind had slowed down.

This experience taught me an important lesson - 

"It is not about how much energy we have or don't have. What matters is how we manage our energy. Energy management is more crucial than time management. Understand how the energy reserve can be sustained throughout the day, instead of exhausting it in quick bursts by overdoing or multitasking."

Book Review: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

 This book often pops up as a recommendation by bookstagrammers and so I was curious to read it. And I must say it didn't disappoint. It is a short, easy-to-read 130 pager. The author succinctly conveys four guiding principles that lead to personal freedom. These are based on wisdom passed down from the Toltec philosophers of Mexico.

The four agreements though might sound simple, are extremely impactful when practiced on a daily basis.

• Be impeccable with your word
• Don't take anything personally
• Don't make assumptions
• Always do your best

As the author explains the context behind each of these agreements, I'm sure most of us would nod our heads as these are relatable to our lives and situations we have faced.

Apart from these agreements, the one idea that made a strong impact on me was about the domestication of humans and our belief system. The author correlates our beliefs to a Book of Law that rules our mind. The inner Judge uses this Book of Law to judge everything we think, feel and do.

"Everything lives under the tyranny of this Judge. Everytime we do something that goes against the Book of Law, the Judge says we are guilty, we need to be punished, we should be ashamed. This happens many times a day, day after day, for all the years of our lives."

A few favorite lines from this book:

"Taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about "me"."

"When we believe something, we assume we are right about it to the point that we will destroy relationships in order to defend our position."

"Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you're expecting a reward.........If you take action because you have to, then there is no way you are going to do your best."

"We must forgive those we feel have wronged us, not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because we love ourselves so much we don't want to keep paying for the injustice"

Do check out this book for more such powerful insights conveyed in simple writing.

Book Review: Essentialism by Greg McKeown

 

This book had been on my wishlist for a while. And I finally bought a copy and read it over the past few weeks.

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I bought this book for Rs.199.

Essentialism provides a neat 4-step framework to simplify our life across multiple aspects with a core theme "Less but better". The framework doesn't stop at a conceptual level. Rather, each step is explained through a series of actionable verbs.

The author has shared multiple anecdotes to explain the framework. What surprised me the most is that he gives a lot more emphasis to our work lives and how one could go about separating the vital few from the trivial many.

He sets the context of the Essentialist mindset right from the beginning - "If you don't prioritise your time, someone else will". Social pressure, increased number of choices, opinion overload, pressure to "have it all" - all these aspects push us into the non-essential mode of living. The most impactful step for me is the 3rd - Eliminate, where the author talks about the importance of gaining clarity, saying No, editing our life to cut out the unimportant and how to go about setting boundaries.

Though I loved the overall structure of the book, it felt a bit repetitive in most places and sometimes, a little dry too. But this doesn't dilute the effect of the powerful messages being conveyed. A few samples below:

"Our options may be things but a choice is an action"

"In order to have focus, we need to escape to focus"

"Our highest priority is to protect our ability to prioritise"

"Of all forms of human motivation, the most effective one is progress"

"Boundaries are a little like the walls of a sandcastle. The second we let one fall over, the rest of them come crashing down."

"When we have strong internal clarity, it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions"

Do pick up this book, if simplifying your life is something you intend to do and looking for inspiration.

Being a cat parent

Raising a single cat is a different experience as compared to raising siblings. Over the past one year, we have been privileged to witness this lovely bond of two sisters. They clean each other, do mock play fights and cuddle up together during nap times. They are so used to being together that on rare occasions when one of them steps out for a stroll, the other gets restless and agitated.

Last night was the ultimate example of the love these two sisters have for each other. It was a rainy evening and Georgina (the one with orange shade) climbed onto a pipe, got stuck in 3rd floor and was shouting for help. We went looking for her, kept calling her to come down but she was so scared.

As we were figuring out options to rescue her, Octi (the one with grey shade and braver of the two) climbed up the pipe like Tarzan and went closer to her sister. Georgina calmed down and Octi tried to show her different ways to get down. She even looked at alternate ways to come back home, but Georgina was petrified to follow the lead of Octi. By then, it started to pour heavily and we returned home. Soon after, Octi came back too, looking disappointed that she couldn't rescue her sister yet.

We had to keep Octi inside as we didn't want her to get stuck in the rain. She was shouting for a while and went to sleep.

We went to sleep, praying Georgina returns home safely. She somehow managed to come back by 6am and both sisters were happy to be reunited ♥️♥️

After a long nap, they woke up and Georgina had so much to share with me about her adventurous night. The meows were loud, long and with varied pitch 😁

One of the important sources of happiness is realising this simple fact that your presence matters to someone. You mean something to someone.

I came back from work this afternoon and Octi was sleeping on the sofa. As soon as she saw me, she gave me plenty of cat kisses (slow winks are cat's expression of love), jumped down and rubbed herself against my legs, followed me to the kitchen, asking for milk, drank a few sips and then sat next to me on the sofa.

If our other pet cat W was around, she would have jumped onto my lap and taken a nice nap 😊

Octi showers me with love in her own way. Cats have their own unique personality. Cats though claimed to be independent, they show love and attention as well, much like dogs.

Pets have no agenda or a lot of expectations from us. They don't demand that you do things for them, calling out as though it is our duty. They acknowledge your presence and shower love for just being there for them.

Raising pets impacts our happiness and mood in multiple levels. That's what I have experienced in the past 8 years of being a cat parent.

Book Review: Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti

 When life gives you lemons one after another, you either make a batch of lemon pickle or devour books from the philosophy genre. Over the past 2 years, my hands by default navigate to the Philosophy section in my home library. The intent is not to pick up every learning from these books and put them into practice right away. Rather, I pick up these books to help me get answers to the questions that run in my mind. The feel of Aha moment is so real and priceless, when a book conveys exactly what I needed to hear.

Having read "What are you doing with your life?" by J. Krishnamurti (JK) a few months back, I wanted to continue diving into his writings further. This urge was also amplified by the book "Finding awareness", where it was evident that JK had a striking influence on the author Amit Pagedar and his thought process.

I picked up this book "Freedom from the Known" and while I was reading it, I realized that I shouldn't rush through. This books needs time and focus. Though it is a short book, the message is so deep and hard to grasp. I'm pretty sure I didn't understand all the passages, but I devoured it slowly, chapter by chapter.

This book is a compilation of passages from his talks on various topics. "Freedom from the known", as the title suggests, helps us identify those known aspects that bind us and keep us imprisoned for life. If we can observe our life as is without any judgments or analysis, we see a lot of our past conditioning, feeding our fears, desires, pleasures and pains.

Any form of outward change is triggered from within. In order to visualize and realize this, all we need is keen observation of our daily lives.

JK's typical style of writing comprises a lot of questioning and probing. His thoughts are not stated as mere facts or opinions. Rather, he engages in a dialogue that makes you want to stop and reflect.

A few months back, I had written a post on what it would be if there was a factory reset button for each of us. There was a powerful passage in this book, that resonated so deeply with that thought.

"You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. To live completely, wholly, everyday as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is."

The key take aways for me from this book are

• Observe, reflect and understand yourself as you are AND not focus on how you wish to be
• Be your own teacher and your own disciple when it comes to self awareness
• Keep your mind alert, clear and sensitive in order to observe yourself keenly
• Contradiction and conflict arises where there is a desire to change something/someone from "what is" to "what should be"
• Energy gets dissipated when there is any inward friction or outward conflict.

A few favorite passages from the book

"So long as you are compelled to do something because it is your duty, you don't love what you are doing. When there is love, there is no duty and no responsibility."

"Measuring ourselves all the time against something or someone is one of the primary causes of conflict."

"In all our relationships, each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have a relationship, not the human beings themselves."

"When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality or by tradition, it breeds violence"

"What are we afraid of is the repetition of the old - the thought of what has been projecting into the future. Therefore, thought is responsible for fear"