Lock, Stock and Barrel Down

We’ve just completed seven weeks in lockdown in Mumbai and while the first couple of weeks seemed surreal, I can’t quite remember what the original normal was anymore. I am trying to recollect what incessant honking sounds like or what it feels like to get pushed around against my will on a railway platform. How does a Margherita pizza taste? What was the name of my office building again? Is it my imagination or can I actually hear the wall clock ticking? Seeing sparrows and listening to Magpie Robins outside my window is no more a novelty. Neither is seeing myself transform from a well-groomed chap to Shaggy from Scooby-Doo (I miss my barber the most). I’m quite certain I heard that pigeon say “Look, son, the exhibit in this next window is a human being, or at least was. Now it looks like some sort of relic”.

I intend to make good use of my time while I’m away from the world, and while I do spend a fair portion of my week doing household chores and work related to my profession, I also want to engage in activities that are actually productive and meaningful. Here is a list of things I do and am considering doing. Maybe you want to try a thing or ten yourself.

• Perform household chores blindfolded just to ensure that I know the exact location of all the furniture and artifacts in all the rooms since I have rarely looked away from my phone and television screens when at home. And of course, since I don’t drive in traffic anymore on uneven roads, this provides the thrill of a bumpy ride.
• Jump out at people at home from behind the sofa or from top of the cupboard just to make sure they get their daily dose of exercise that drives their heart rate up.
• Hangout with my action figures. At least they don’t try to keep talking to me about the morbid situation that engulfs us. I might even do a photoshoot with them and send the results to Fashion TV.
• Play dumb charades on the balcony with the distant neighbor or the occasional pedestrian on the street below. The patrolling cops may get competitive and show me around their workplace.
• Create an orchestra with the stainless steel vessels in the kitchen and make the dog the lead singer. The cops might invite me again. Hey, at least I’m getting out of the apartment often.
• Try a new hairstyle where the first step would be to hope for some hair growth on my head. I know it’s a long process but we have time.
• Have a water gun fight where all the guns are filled with hand sanitizer.
• Compose and sing a song. Then send it to Simon Cowell. The reaction might keep me entertained for weeks until it starts affecting my confidence.
• Play dead or practice social distancing when called on for additional household chores.
• Put my daughter’s toy sea animals in the tub and go snorkeling.
• Put beer bottles in different rooms in the apartment, dress up, and go bar hopping.
• Direct a ‘home’ production.
• Turn off the lights, get onto my daughter’s tricycle, and inch towards the television. I’ve always wanted to experience a drive-in theatre.
• Break my piggy bank, have someone hide the contents, and go treasure hunting.
• Play monopoly in the building society with our actual apartments and use underhanded tactics to win every piece of real estate available. The lack of a regular flow of income has to be compensated somewhere.

I wish I could illustrate the numerous other ideas I have in my head but I don’t suppose the lockdown will go on for that long.

It’s easy to get frustrated and perturbed about how things are and how they might turn out going forward. It’s also easy to get swayed by all the negativity that has hit our senses these past few months because we won’t stop reading, thinking, seeing news reports and studies, and speaking about the current pandemic.

Why subject ourselves to this endless misery? It’s best to engage in some positive productivity and while I strongly recommend the actionable items in the list above, it won’t hurt to participate in some lesser but useful activities. Play with your kid, you won’t do it as much again (or hopefully you’ll create a life habit to do so). Learn a new skill through self-practice or online courses. Exercise, you already live in your gymnasium (where else will you go?). Pursue that hobby you have always given yourself excuses not to. Begin to eat healthy home-cooked food (are you really going to risk regular food delivery?). Read, let me say that again, READ!! (No, not the news. Please go read the previous paragraph again). Start a side hustle (or hustle your sibling). Look outside your window and actually observe. Slow down and breathe, you have time.

The current circumstances may last for a week, a month, or even a year. We can’t predict the future but we can certainly put our present to good use. If coronavirus can kill us, so can Tik Tok videos. If we have survived the latter, we can survive the former too.

Que Sera Sera. Just co-vid the flow.

 

Run Track Mind

Fitness is often a misinterpreted term. A lot of people think that anybody that goes to the gym, walks daily, plays sports on a regular basis, makes over a hundred phone calls a day, or posts every hour on social media is likely to be fit. Bulging muscles and a great physique don’t necessarily justify fitness, although they certainly show evidence that the incumbents of these bodies have above average fitness. And this is true to a great extent, where someone who indulges in daily exercises (speaking for 6 hours a day doesn’t count) is likely to have a better level of fitness than the average joe who ensures that the stock price of fast food places stay up and then takes selfies to capture these moments. And it’s incredibly sad how many youngsters are a part of this ordeal (It doesn’t show on them yet but if they continue on this path it will do so a lot sooner than it would have otherwise).

In my opinion, fitness relates to both mind and body. It is the effectiveness of our immunity against illnesses, which are both physical and mental in nature. How good are we in maintaining a lifestyle that allows us to keep a majority of the factors in our environment trying to corrupt our physical and mental being at bay? Whether it’s overindulgence in food and drink (it always is in the unhealthy type), a sedentary existence, toxic people, a negative mindset, the desire to cheat and hurt, disregard for regular health checkups, disregard for people that truly care, supporting the wrong sports teams, and even the News Hour on the Times Now network.

And while a fit mind is of the absolute essence, a fit body is a must to encourage and support that fit mind. I have always noticed a drop in my mental resilience whenever I have been sick or not at an acceptable level of physical fitness. I am disciplined in my work and personal goals and make it a point to achieve my daily goals. However, on the days that I lack energy or feel a bit under the weather, I tend to miss achieving a few things. This leads to frustration and then I try to put myself through the grind even if I don’t feel well (because I am superhuman), and I end up feeling worse health wise because of the duress. And this saga goes around in cycles.

I have played sport for a large part of my life and am generally keen on fitness. I walk/jog regularly, work on my core, as well as try and meditate (at least sit still and not get distracted) for ten to fifteen minutes daily. As useful as this routine has been, it’s served only part of the purpose when I have been undisciplined with my diet. And this brings me back to the point in the opening paragraph about muscles and physiques. All that amounts to nothing if you have a cold every fortnight (And walk around looking like Rudolf the Reindeer). A disciplined diet (it’s amazing how many people think of a diet as not eating, eating very little, or only eating tasteless stuff) is as important as exercising. In fact, someone with a great diet and minimal exercising is likely to be healthier than someone that exercises regularly but lacks discipline in their food consumption. I have certainly experienced this. And a poor diet has led to sickness more often than I would like and has affected my exercising as well as other facets of my daily life.

For instance, when I experience low energy levels (and I’m speaking of normal energy and not the Doctor Strange type sorcery), concentration during various activities at work and otherwise become difficult. I tend to feel tired easily, my focus is off, and I get less done than I would if I felt energetic. I feel irritable and lack interest in participating in any activity that involves using my mind. I’m happy to snap at the first person that comes in my path, no matter what they are trying to say. During times like these, when I go through the motions of my daily exercises, I feel drained as opposed to revitalized (which is exactly what I feel when I’m healthy and fit) at the end of the session. When I meditate hoping that all my ‘chakras’ will open up and I will sense positive vibrations, all I get is vibrations and convulsions from the coughing fit I get every 60 seconds.

And between these devastating states of existence, I have had moments of complete bliss where I feel physically fit and healthy. I am high on vitality, am more open to people trying to speak to me, I get everything on my planner done, I sleep well, I feel relaxed, I am very positive in my approach to everything, and I also find myself smiling involuntarily more often. How often do any of us smile without reason? In fact, most of us desperately search for that one reason to allow us to do so.

The differences in my mental well being when I am physically fit and healthy as opposed to when I am not, are stark. And while it is important to improve our mindsets and try to incorporate positive thinking continuously, a healthy body is necessary to permit us to do so with greater efficiency. Just like learning expert, Jim Kwik says “When your body moves, your brain grooves”

It’s not about trying to schedule fitness into our lives but about scheduling our lives to include a fitness regime. This has always served me well. So, are you going to get off your haunches and follow suit?

The Highest De’greed’

You’re really greedy!! Would you take this as a compliment or would you give a piece of your mind (there isn’t a lot of grey matter going around these days so try and be conservative, so as not to exhaust your resources) to people that said this to you? Or would you just stand there fuming or even try and take a swing at them (Unless you were caught with two oversized tubs of ice cream, with a spoon in each, in which case you wouldn’t really have an argument)? Even if we innately know that we often try and take more than our share, we do not want to be associated with this word.

‘Greed’ is considered to be such a negative word and in most cases rightly so.

We always believe we have been greedy for good reason, and we like to explain ourselves with jargon like ‘survival of the fittest’ (even though we are at least 30 pounds overweight), ‘jungle law’ (I’ve never actually known anyone that has seen a transcript of this legal document), ‘I worked harder’ (like we have the statistics on how hard everyone else worked), ‘it’s God’s will’ (like he shared it with us on WhatsApp), ‘my family needs this’ (while others are just sacrificial lambs), ‘everyone does it’ (because they come and tell you each time they do), ‘I had no choice’ (because Don Corleone made you an offer you couldn’t refuse), ‘someone else would have done it anyway’ (we need to beat them to the punch, don’t we?), ‘big deal’, ‘no one cares’, ‘it’s not that bad’, and a list of other innovative reasons, long enough to rival the length of the Mahabharata manuscript.

However, greed isn’t only about wanting more but is also about settling for less. People often hide their greed under the garb of staying grounded (And therefore aiming low. There is no reason why we can’t be extremely successful and yet humble), and being content. At times this need to resort to mediocrity arises from lack of ambition (we will smack our TV remote a million times to get it to function, but won’t change the batteries), at times it’s because we are fearful of the unknown (like the wife’s looks after a visit to the parlor), a lot of times most things just seem improbable because of our restricted upbringing (where we do what is told, things that are safe, and don’t ask questions), and many a time it’s just our ego telling us that we know best.

While there are many of us that truly have very few desires (especially material ones) and find joy and fulfillment in the simplest forms of living, most of us do not. We desire a lot but then are not willing to take the actions required to fulfill them (Thank God for food delivery services because we are not even willing to cook anymore). Therefore, we not only continue our existence in secret resentment, constantly telling ourselves that we’re very content but also expect our loved ones and others around us to live by this code. And a lot of these people could be dependents, with no means to go after their dreams just yet. Our homemaker spouses, our adolescent children, our ageing parents, our business partners and employees, our extended family members, our dogs, our cats, our fish, our action figures, and a host of other people we share our lives with, may have to curb their dreams because we tend to be selfish and greedy in only adhering to what we feel is right. We don’t feel we have it in us to follow our true desires passionately and aggressively, and therefore believe no one else around us should (Only we should be in charge of the TV remote or what radio station plays in the car. Only we should decide what gets made for dinner. Only we should determine how a sales pitch should be constructed. Only we should get to select what movie to watch. Only we should be the ones allowed to yell and scream when annoyed. Only we should decide who our children marry, or what career path they take. Only we should have the final word, even if reason goes down the drain).

However, greed in the right direction, with pure intent, and in the right quantities, is beneficial. In my mind, a quest for knowledge, hunger for stability, an objective to be healthy, aspiration for freedom, and above all a burning desire to contribute to the world around us, to leave it a better place after we’re gone, are forms of healthy greed. We need to find it in ourselves to aim beyond our own means and needs. We need to understand that we have the ability to impact our world positively, by feeding our minds with the right signals.

Is it enough for us just to live for ourselves, or if we are generous, for our families and friends? Or do we believe in our own abilities to liberate ourselves from our fears and limited thinking, to make a contribution to a population that can’t be counted on our fingertips, but rather is reflected in the census studies? We certainly should.

While we aim with a generous heart to make an impact in the world, we must continue to nourish our health, mind, and soul to ensure that we are fit in every way to do so. Therefore, be greedy. Go for your walks to keep yourself fit. Spend that extra time to read and learn. Meditate daily to ensure a calm and stable form. Burn the midnight oil to plan and revisit your mission every day. Network and connect with people that share your values and goals. Implement brave and unconventional strategies in your business. And even be courageous and scold your boss for his inept business practices (If you get fired you will have some time at hand to catch up on all those Netflix shows you’ve missed).

This does not mean that we don’t find quality time for our family, friends, associates, professional partners, and others in our close circle. It means we must be more efficient with our time in order to ensure that we are able to give them our time and effort and work toward our goals as well. However, we must also realize that our loved ones can be unreasonable at times and we cannot always give in to their whims. As long as we do justice to them and our vision, we have the right to be greedy, because the result of this greed will not only result in the improvement of our own lives, but those of theirs, as well as several other people around us (This does not give you license to tell them you’re busy and spend the day watching sport and drinking beer).

Whether our aim is to serve our family better, improve our organization, impact our community, better our town, or benefit millions, we need to be greedy and stay hungry for knowledge, health, longevity, and consistent growth, leading to desired results.

What’s the highest de’greed’ you can achieve?