New Age”Y” Weekend Warrior

Are you a weekend warrior? Do you dread your work and live for the weekend? During today’s run, I heard a podcast “How to have work life balance”, the oft repeated question and conundrum

When I heard this term “weekend warrior”a few months back, it made me slip into my old memory lane (Year 2011). I used to worry about weekends. I used to get frustrated about the whole idea of weekends and Sunday evenings. In fact I used to keep asking my wife “what is our weekend plan” and when I heard from her ” not planned” I used to tear my hair (I had hair in those days). Things changed after meeting some friends in a public speaking event and that changed me. I still recollect some parts of the speaker’s speech where he mentioned about the work life balance. I started meeting a lot of people in toastmasters, made a good number of acquaintances in toastmasters and we used to regularly meet up on Saturdays. Around the same time, my friend Sunil and Rahul took me to this book shop “Spell and Bound.” It also had an eatery. My friends would buy books and at the top of this book shop they used to make Katti Rolls. My attraction was the Roll and my friends used to be spell bound with the books.

One day Sunil gave me a book titled “Drive” and asked me to give it a try. There was no internal drive for me to read “Drive” for years. Today when I reflect back, that selfless act of Sunil remains with me and I continue to inspire a lot of my community friends to read.

After picking up a reading habit, I started thinking, “Why do people welcome Friday evenings and hate Sunday evenings?” Maybe they’ve not found their “WHY?”

The perfect answer lies with Simon Sinek and he keeps repeating this every now and then. In an interview with Reggie Yates, he says:

“My “Why” is to inspire people to do what inspires them. My “Why” is the foundation for my vision: I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single day inspired to go to work, feel safe when they are there and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. This is what I believe and it is unwavering.

A Why is not something we change.  It is not something we adapt from time to time. A Why is the sum total of who we are. It is made up of all the experiences we had when we were growing up. Our Whys are fully formed by the time we are in our late teens and the rest of our lives offer us an opportunity to live in balance with our Why. This is what gives our work and indeed our lives meaning – that the thing that inspires us remains constant throughout our lives.”

I was thinking how practical it would be to live in such a world where every one gets up fully charged up for work and continues charging up for the weekend. The warrior in you never rests, be it a weekday or weekend – become a new age”Y” warrior.

Was he correct when he mentioned that your WHY is fully formed in your late teens? I had a conversation with my wife on this topic. On reflection, I found that I was always found of writing, liked word plays and I still remember watching Vir Sanghvi, Karan Thapar and Prannoy Roy’s interviews on tv. I also used to make a lot of notes and they are still with me! In those formative years maybe my “WHY” needed validation. So when Sunil gave me that book “Drive” in Spell and Bound, it was a moment that made my inner self accept and learn to read and speak better from there on.

Last week, I became a new age”Y” weekend warrior. After the quarter ended , I dipped into my social circles. First it was with Toastmasters Community, in the evening with my family circle, next day with a college friend over a cappucchino  and my afternoon was spent in my soul space (not the mall).

I like to truly live by the quote of Joseph Campbell ” Your sacred space is where you will find yourself again and again”. To enter that space I had to be with those communities and enjoy every moment. We joked , pulled each others’ legs and laughed.  In each space, my ability to connect, collaborate and communicate was very essential.

Today most of my time is spent with people like Sunil who are helping me to live in balance with my “WHY”. So don’t become a weekend warrior, engage with different communities and keep validating your WHY.