” What are the things that give you good vibes?” A close friend asked me last weekend.
I was ready with the answer, ” Coffee shops, Book shops, Sports shops, walking with backpack and headphones listening to music, meeting friends, and finally writing”.
I had experienced all the things that I had mentioned and I wondered why I have not blogged for the last few weeks. It took me exactly 2 weeks to write this blog. In fact, my daughter was telling me that she is yet to realise that we are already in 2023. I guess that is the way it is. After all, she is yet to get over the year-end holidays. For me, it was a sheer lack of discipline to get back to that blog routine.
So here is my take on how the year 2022 was for me and how I felt. I had to dip into my journal to see and recollect. That is one reason I journal every day to keep a track of my day-to-day activities, As they say “Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.” This may be true as I have noticed that when I sit down to write it comes easily in the morning and there were times when I missed for a day, it is very difficult to recollect and write it down. I generally record the events and also if I felt good about the day. Sometimes there is a place for exercise, meditation, and mindful eating which I developed during the course of the year. One thing which I definitely recorded was the movies we saw and also special events. So. it was worthwhile to have that experience of turning those pages once again to skim and record them for posterity in an online medium. I am sure we can switch to online journalling but at the moment sipping coffee and holding that black pen and writing drives my morning mood and helps me to channel my energy better and get into the next set of things. So I decided to share some of the things that stood out for me as good vibes in 2022 :
That was a Saturday, my wife had planned to attend the Bangalore Lit fest. That was her “vibe of the tribe.” I was given the onerous task of teaching my daughter Mathematics. I started with the equations which she was finding difficult to solve. “Good mathematics is not about how many answers you know, it’s about how you behave when you don’t know“. I managed myself well, at least that is how I would like to believe myself. I knew as after some time my daughter started figuring out that ” Dad must have forgotten everything he learned in school”. So it was time for me to roll up my sleeves and get down to the drawing board literally. I asked her for the whiteboard and I started writing equations to balance. After three repeated attempts I finally got it. That made me understand how much cool my parents were when they tried to teach me mathematics and I was lucky to have a good tuition teacher. The lesson for me was :
After teaching her maths I had to literally put on Enrique songs to have some good vibes. It took me some time to get into the groove. It looks like that episode had a profound impact on my daughter. The other day my wife mentioned that our daughter was mentioning it to her friends that we should keep trying a problem that they encountered and she highlighted that Dad said not to give up. It was nice to see what lesson she picked from that mathematics encounter and how that generated some good vibes
2022 was a year where I saw close to 25 movies. Even though I do not recollect a lot of those movies what has left good vibes has been the web series. We ended the year with Mukhbir, but apart from that Khaki, Maharani, Tanav, Rocket Boys did influence me very much and I enjoyed watching all of them. In Mukhbir, I was hooked to a ghazal, “Humse Toh Woh Behtar Hai”.
What if India couldn’t win the T20 world cup, we enjoyed seeing a couple of matches that we won especially the India- Pakistan one. But the best part of 2022 in sports was with my daughter watching the football finals. I was not sure if she was interested in seeing the finals. However, she came across and sat till Argentina celebrated the cup. I was about to switch off the TV and go to sleep after 60 mins as Argentina my favourite was all set to clinch the title. But then we now know what a terrible mistake it would have been if I had done it.
Finally, Spotify created a wrap-up for me and presented me with a short video. It was interesting how I listened to different genres for good vibes. With all the good vibes I got in 2022 let me get into 2023 with better vibes. As Pearl S Buck put it, ” One faces the future with one’s past.”
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