I was rearranging my home workplace and I have this habit to keep rotating things around in my room. This is to bring some newness and playfulness to life. So on that day, I decided to Marie Kondo to my room to discard some of the old papers. Before deciding to throw them away I did a random skimming. Somebody said it best, you should hold that paper only once and then discard it away. That was not easy as I kept cluttering my room with papers. A belief that if I do not read it occasionally I will lose it from memory. So this time, I decided to digitize it and store it in the cloud. As I was doing this exercise I came across the above quote on time which was attributed to Einstein.
We are already in February and I was wondering how did January pan out for me? It was interesting that since I have been traveling most of January the time was also racing along with me. It was thrilling to note some of the things we did in January particularly the time we had with our near and dear ones. Apart from that, I was venturing deeper into what are some of the things which made the cut in January. I started my vlog series yet to put a rhythm like my blogs.
I was fascinated with Seth Godin’s idea of ” Love what you do vs Do what you love”. That was a nice framework to execute things into the future. More on this framework and lessons as we go along this year.
Another thing was the number of comedy videos I must have consumed in January. I have identified this as a hack to get out of a lower state. I have been having a laugh riot even while traveling and some of my co-passengers were peering their eyes into my screen in the flight. Coupled with those videos had been the effect of Coke Studio with its combination of pop, rock, and Sufi music. My YouTube algorithm now has put together a playlist that triggers off a set of music which was very soothing and it increased playfulness.
On the routines side, my daily walking, journalling and podcast ( seeing and listening) continued all through January with some minor breaks in the case of walking when I ate a lot on the previous night or was travelling. One important realization was to eat less so that I can have more energy to do the things I have planned to do. I am also experimenting with my journaling as some days lot of stuff that I capture go around the state of mind I went through in the day. As the journal page rightly displays 2021 is about ” growing from inside” I am also going with that flow. One thing I continued in January was noting down people, things and situations as part of gratitude. One of the best podcast messages which stuck with me was Daniel Goleman’s idea of “First-person Plural”. The best question I asked my wife in January was ” what is the difference between brain and mind”?
So that was my January round-up. An uncut version of what I have thought and felt, what I looked at and what I saw, what I listened to and what I heard and what I felt like and what I acted.
This whole exercise of looking back at the time made me realize that we have to keep adding life to years. In my case, if that adding life comes from a RICH place that is a RICH Uncut share. As I was reading the biography of Shashi Deshpande, there was an apt capture, ” by listening to the stories of others, we learn to tell our own“. My story was about time with family, routines, playfulness, and asking some deep questions with myself.
Should we keep checking our time and live our lives? I am not sure but we can do one thing, do what the clock does:
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