NOW or never

 I was talking to my family and as part of a casual conversation, my mother mentioned how my father was planning to buy a car just before he passed away. He had just got promoted and we were planning to move back to Bangalore and live together. 

This conversation has stayed with me ever since. The uncertainty of life hit me the hardest this time. I know it may sound ironic as I should have ideally realized the uncertainty when he passed away, 25 years ago, all of a sudden. Am sure all of us have been hit with some kind of uncertainty/shocks/suddenness throughout our lives. But still we don't want to believe that there may never be a tomorrow. We always want to believe that we have a lot of time, and keep planning and planning for the future instead of doing things NOW. 

This conversation actually helped me come out of my stuck mode or nervous mode and is helping me in following the motto "NOW or never". 

It is NOW time for me now 😆

New and Fresh

I heard one of the characters in a tv series say this today - "one of those moments where everything is so perfect and so wonderful that you almost feel sad, because nothing can ever be this good again".

It made me wonder. Though during the moment we are happy we don't realize or think much (like the above scenario), we tend to compare most moments in our lives to the past good ones and wish the current moment would go back the old way. 

"Good old days" is a phrase most of us use. 

Remember the song - 

"Wish we could turn back time

to the good old days

when our momma sang us to sleep and now we are stressed out" 

Reminded me of a quote I had seen many years ago - 

"Don't feel bad it is over, Smile because it happened" - such a beautiful reminder 😊

It is Ugadi today - the beginning of new year - 

- my favourite radio song I grew up listening to - 

Yuga yugadi kaledaru

Ugadi marali baruthide

Hosa varushake, hosa harushava

Hosathu hosathu tharutide

Hosathu hosathu tharutide

Bevu Bella - bitter and sweet

Women's Day

Today is 'Women's Day'. I am not a fan of any particular day. As everyday is an everything day. But it is an extra feel good day  As I enjoy doing rangolis for each of these special days, I was searching for an apt one for today and somehow nothing appealed to me. Finally I saw a woman looking at her reflection in a mirror and loved it. So here it is. 

 

The above can mean different things to different people. It depicts so many things - appreciating ourselves, loving ourselves, respecting ourselves - everything else will follow only when we are able to do this - when we can look at ourselves in the mirror and feel these emotions. There have been days when I didn't go near a mirror because I would forget about there was a mirror. It has taken me so many years to be able to look at myself in the mirror and stay with myself! 

It also reminds me of how a child loves looking at the mirror and keeps having fun looking at him/herself. A reminder that we should figure out ways to have fun with ourselves / on our own. 

Of course this doesn't mean that we become self centered. But the person who cheers us the most will be or has to be ourselves. Waiting for someone else to do this job will never work. And we need this cheering to walk on our paths. 

Colours of Life

It is the Holi week - the festival of colours. Our school celebrates Holi by wearing a different colour each day, so just like the spring in nature where there is a burst of colours on trees - new leaves, old leaves, yellow flowers, purple flowers, orange flowers, pale pink flowers, our whole school was seen in yellow/green, purple/orange, pink/gray, red/blue and white. It was a lovely sight, with a day of playing with colours, singing and dancing. I had decided to wear saree the whole week. Life is always about the choices we make, the choice to celebrate the tiniest of things or not to. 

I started the beginning of the week with a headache. For a few months I have been waking up with a headache. I have been getting them since the last 20 years, but over the last few years the frequency has reduced. And now it is back again. I started analyzing the reason and of course there were 1000s of reasons   Instead I decided to go with the FLOW! 

I went to my Sunday morning class, did all the work I had to do on Sunday, wore a saree and headed to school on Monday and so on. What I am trying to say is that instead of worrying about the problem, I just tried to do whatever possible, and left the things that were not. 

Doing things we love

Doing things that we love even when we are alone
Weekly golguppa eating

My mat and coffee = perfect day 😂

The same tree after a few days!
Change!

Colour colour which colour do you choose? 😜

I choose me 😉

Confidence

 One of the most important things in life is CONFIDENCE. Everything else follows it. Having faced a very low confidence in myself, I have realised the value of it even more. The first thing we as adults need to instill in children is confidence. Rest of the things come as a result of confidence. Again, there is a line between overconfidence and being just confident.

Also this confidence level keeps varying at various stages of one's life. I am not sure if it can be a straight line for anyone throughout life. It goes up and down due to various factors. The key is to keep the confidence level stable and higher up to sail through this journey. As I mentioned earlier, I have struggled with being confident. I have felt low on this most of the time and after all these years, I have started focusing on improving this. There is no one way to boost our confidence. But definitely doing things we love and enjoy is one big and easy way. 

After a few years of feeling physically low on energy, I was feeling that I have become weak physically. It is very easy for one to feel low on confidence as so many external factors also act as boosters. But slowly I have started relying on all the things I enjoy doing and have started doing more of those and without realizing my confidence level has been increasing. It is a very tough feeling to explain in words. I can only say that anyone who feels confident knows the joy of feeling confident. The best part is, it being very infectious. When we feel confident about one thing, we slowly start feeling confident in all other aspects of life as well. Gradually it spreads like a wildfire 

Remember, confidence does not mean perfection or coming first.

It just enables us to enjoy everything we do. It tells us that it is ok to have doubts, and yet continue, tells us it is ok if we don't get answers, but to continue walking, tells us to see the beauty in uncertainty. And so many other things.

I was super hungry after one of my classes, and so I went to a hotel and ate breakfast alone. My mom was surprised and asked if I didn't feel odd eating alone. And I feel inspired seeing her do everything alone. So, for each one of us this confidence-booster will be different. For one it may be doing something that one is not comfortable with; for someone it may be doing something they are very good at; for someone doing something that they are scared of; for someone it could be doing something that one is not good at, but just that trying can boost the confidence; and for someone it can be doing something new, trying new things; doing things alone; doing things with a new person - the list varies with each individual and for the same individual it could change with time/circumstance. Key is to identify our confidence-booster and consistently do the same.

My easy go-to confidence booster 

Love Laugh Live

 I guess I will continue from my previous post "Love". It feels like we can go through life, or rather sail through life ONLY if we are doing what we love. We may not agree to this as it may not be possible to always do what we love and hence we tell ourselves that it doesn't matter. When we are not doing what we love, our mind is restless, the level of restlessness depends on each individual, but the mind definitely gets restless (according to me) and this leads to sooooo many other craziness in our lives. 

Everything again boils down to the word "Love". Even though it may seem impossible to do the things we love (due to various circumstances) we HAVE TO try and figure out a way to do at least a few of the things we love on a daily basis or again at least more regularly. This is the only way if we want that weird feeling in our heart to go away, if we are in confusion, if we want to make sense of something and if we want peace. I know we cannot be dependent on external factors , but when we are doing the things we love everything else naturally falls in place. And this doing things we love can be as simple as cleaning our house or watching TV or going somewhere or sleeping at home. The point is to acknowledge what we love and try to do the same along with all the other practical/mandatory/non-negotiables we have to do.

People who are happy and feel sorted and safe in life are the ones who are already doing things they love, with or without realizing. 

So, let's put on our love boots and march ahead. Sounds cheesy 😛😂?

The reason for this post - was feeling my lowest recently and the only way I came out of it was because I did so many things I love! Here is a glimpse 😊

Celebrate

Chocolate cake + coffee = 😋

After my 7.5km run/walk

108 Surya Namaskaras

Rathasapthami

Eating

A real luxury

Love

 Feels like a long time since I wrote anything, but it's not true. My mind was filled with many things. Had to travel for work right at the beginning of the year. And I have to say that it was an amazing trip, packed with activities, and I loved every bit of it. Please note the key word here - love - I loved the whole experience, even though it involved sleepless nights, popping in tablets, mental alertness every moment, leaving behind my kids at home when they were not well etc. The reason I am writing about this is to emphasize the word love. 

We will do anything if it is something that we love! And this holds good with people as well. Everything in life boils down to love. I used to wonder every time I heard about this word love - love everything, love everyone etc. Nothing in life is perfect and no one in this world is perfect. We may want a perfect EVERYTHING - a perfect friend, a perfect job, a perfect child, a perfect life_ _ _ _. Perfectness doesn't exist in this world. But what exists is love, and that love makes us look at things and at people in a perfect way. It is only because of the love we have for something or someone, we make things work. 

A simple example - a close friend or our child - they may not be perfect (by the definition), but we feel great with them, we feel they are amazing. We feel this because of the love we have for them. We ignore anything that is negative (according to us) about them. The same thing does not hold good with the outer circle, whom we may call our acquaintances or contacts. Instead we ignore them completely, we become unhappy that they are a certain way. Whereas the same trait in our loved ones won't bother us as much. 

So the minute we start treating everyone with the same love, our world starts feeling beautiful. But the question is if it is possible to love everyone the same way? Can we try? Then maybe even the attachment we have towards our family/friends will get distributed and get balanced. 

Food for thought!

We find ways to love everything

When we love something, it appears beautiful, no matter what