Category: Life

Good businesses have guiding philosophies that eventually make them a successful business in the long run. Take computer giant Apple for example. Apple’s philosophies are;

Empathy – an intimate connection with the customer’s feelings. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”

Focus – “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”

Impute – “People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we represent them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

These three simple philosophies set the tone of everything Apple did from the day Mike Markkula (second CEO of Apple Computer), sat down and wrote them down in 1977.

But before you figure our business philosophy, one needs to figure out your life philosophies first because your life philosophies inform your business philosophy.

If they don’t, you will find yourself in conflict with your business.

Our philosophies define who we are.

Everywhere we look; people who have achieved a lot have philosophies and live their lives in accordance with those philosophies.

Gandhi’s philosophies were, “truth, nonviolence, and equality”; J. F.Kennedy’s philosophies were service, social justice and collaboration; Bill Gates’s philosophy is “all lives have equal value”; Elon Musk’s (founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity) philosophy revolve around his vision to “change the world and help humanity”.

If we are living a life without any philosophy we can be easily dissuaded by others and soon start wanting what they have. We feel small, we start to envy them, we start following them and start doing whatever they are doing in order to get where they are and very soon we end up living their dream rather than our own.

In a world constantly trying to tell us who we should be, it’s never been more difficult to build the courage to forge our own path. To make matters worse, the self-help industry is saturated with formulaic listicles. 

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

I took the challenge to figure out what my life philosophies are.

I thought I was pretty clear about my philosophies but for the life of me I couldn’t put them down on a piece of paper.

I subscribe to far too many philosophies, some developed from lessons learned from life’s mistakes, others adopted from those who inspired me. And they were all over the place. No matter how much I searched the corners of my mind I couldn’t bring them out and put them as a coherent text.

We all form philosophies all through our lives and they kick-in at the time of decision making. But if given pen and paper and asked to write them down, very few of us will be able to it.

That is when I started searching the internet.

Jon Mertz, a thought leader suggests six questions to figure out your personal philosophy:

1. What do you get up each and every morning wanting to do?
2. What directs your actions and decisions, especially the impulsive ones?
3. What gives you a sense of satisfaction at the end of the day?
4. What feeling is in the core of your soul that you know to be self-evident? Sounds constitutional, and maybe that is good.
5. Why are your beliefs important to you?
6. How does your philosophy measure up to higher standards or ideals?

Jon Mertz’s personal philosophies are:

• Live simply
• Lead with Spirit
• Always try to do the right things right
• Take time to re-soul

Evan Brown, a writer and film and video composer, has written a great article suggesting three steps to discover personal philosophy.

He suggests tackling the task of discovering life philosophies in three layers – fundamental (spiritual), environment (lifestyle), and mental (behavioral), and suggests a list of questions to determine each category.

I used both their techniques and came up with a list of my personal philosophies.

My list is:

1. Make your days count. How I will spend my days is how I will spend my life.
2. Leave a legacy, either by the life I live or the art I make. I owe it to the next generation.
3. Innovate, shun rigidity and be flexible. In this will lie my joy and my greatness.

As I went through the exercise, I discovered many of my philosophies had changed over time. As I am growing old and going through different stages of life my beliefs are changing. They are bound to change. Perhaps many times in our lives. This is natural, a good evolution of the self, and it should be embraced.

Evan Brown writes, “Establishing a personal philosophy is an endless task. As you get older, become awakened to new ideas, and learn hard lessons from tough experiences, you’re bound to undergo a few course corrections along the way.”

As I write this article, I am still working on discovering and refining my personal philosophies.

In my next post, I will share my creative philosophies.

Photo by Mike Gorrell on Unsplash

Considering we are all going to die one day, how surprising it is that we don’t talk about death at all.

When I say death, I don’t mean death as statistics like we are seeing on TV at the moment, or the death of a loved one.

I mean our own death.

If death is such an inevitability, why don’t we refer to it just like downsizing or moving to a retirement home?

Death is a phase of life just like birth is.

We make a lot of plans for the arrival of a new life but none whatsoever for the departure of another.

I am not going to the extent of buying a coffin next time it is on sale at Costco and keeping it in your living room as they used to in some cultures. That will be going too far and might attract the unwanted attention of the god of death (Yamraj), but I do believe that acceptance of death and talking about it now and then make us appreciate life better.

I know… I know… how insensitive of me to bring the subject of death when there are so many deaths around us. But that is the whole point.

None of us has come with the guarantee that they will live to the ripe old age? None of us were given assurance that our loved ones will be around forever?

Considering how profound its impact is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing it is that death has not taken its place along with love, betrayal, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Nonetheless, a few writers have tackled the subject and shared their insights.

Reflecting on the profound transformations he has witnessed in his work with thousands of dying people and their living loved ones, Frank Ostaseski, the writer of the book The Five Invitations – Discovering what death can teach us about living, writes:

Dying is inevitable and intimate. I have seen ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be. This is not a fairy-tale happy ending that contradicts the suffering that came before, but rather a transcendence of tragedy…. I have witnessed a heart-opening occurring in not only people near death but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn’t know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them, regardless of the suffering they encountered. If that possibility exists at the time of dying, it exists here and now.

– Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations

Rainer Maria Rilke, Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, one of only a few who understood it well. In A Year with Rilke, he wrote:

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.

Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, forgetting the miracle of having lived at all.

Nearly a century later, John Updike, an American novelist, and poet echoed this sentiment: “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

However poetic this notion might be, it remains one of the hardest for us to befriend and reconcile with our irrepressible impulse for aliveness. How, then, are those only just plunging into the lush river of life to confront the prospect of its flow’s cessation?

Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher, a most significant one at the time of the French Renaissance, articulated the central paradox of death and the art of living in The Complete Essays: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.

That paradox is what Mark Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his Collected Poems.

THE END

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

– Mark Strand, Collected Poems.

No law says that we will not be able to live better lives by ignoring death. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Our lifelong struggle to learn how to live is inseparable from two facts – our mortality and our dread of it.

Drawing on the ancient wisdom of Buddhism, Frank Ostaseski considers the inseparability of life and death:

In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death. Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most.

— Frank Ostaseski

Montaigne says it in nutshell as below:

… if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity. –

— Montaigne

But it is Emily Levine, the comedian, and philosopher who offers the most contemporary, brilliant, and funny acceptance of her own mortality and shows how to make the most of it.

PS: A heartfelt thanks to Maria Popova for her site BrainPickings which introduced me to the authors referred to in this article and is also the source of many quotes in this article. Maria, your site is inspirational and, at times, savior.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Three monks were out for a walk — one wise, old monk and two of his younger disciples. 

The older monk points at a large boulder and asks his disciples, “Is that boulder heavy?” 

The younger monks find it an unusual question. “Of course, that boulder is heavy!”

“But,” says the old monk, “only if you pick it up.”

This classic Buddhist parable is a reminder that it is our choice whether we carry the boulder on our backs or leave it where it is.

The boulder in the Buddhist parable represents our worries and none of us is strong enough to carry them on our backs all the time.

The image that comes to my mind of a muscular man who is carrying the atlas on his shoulders. The Atlas represents the world, and no man, doesn’t matter how strong he is, can carry the burden of the world on his shoulders.

Our world has changed forever right in front of our eyes. So many lives have been lost. No one knows when this pandemic is going to be over and when we will be able to live normally, travel normally, and meet our family and friends normally.

We are all worried.

So many people have lost their jobs. Many others have lost their loved ones. The scars the cruelty of nature, mismanagement of governments and greed of certain people have left behind scars will take decades to heal.

We are hurting.

Nobody knows how we are going to emerge at the other end. No one can predict how many more lives will be lost to this pandemic. No one can say for sure how long the pandemic will last or what kind of world we will find ourselves in when we get to the other side of this catastrophe.

We are anxious.

How to control this anxiety.

First of all, we need to put the boulder down.

Feel lighter? I bet you do.

But “Anxiety” doesn’t. 

It doesn’t want you to let go of worry. You see “Anxiety” and “Worry” are best friends. They want to stay together. Anxiety wants you to keep carrying Worry so that she can keep living in your mind.

Rather than lifting the worry back on your shoulders, you are going to offload Anxiety too and make her sit with Worry to keep her company.

How can you do that?

By painting the boulder.

Yes, that is correct.

You are going to go to your cupboard where you keep your paint and brushes, pull those out and start painting.

You see Anxiety is a genie, which needs to remain occupied all the time. It cant sit idle. It needs its master to give her something to do all the time.

Give it something to do.

What? you may ask.

Anything.

That is right.

Tell it to create something.

Creativity is the antidote to anxiety. 

That is the reason musicians all over the world were performing virtual songs during the lockdown, painters were posting videos of their art from their homes, bloggers were writing inspirational stories, dancers were performing online dance parties.

Creativity is how you survive trauma.

What can you get your “Anxiety “to do?

My friend Barbara would say, tell her to paint a Mandala. Pick a rock from your garden, pull out some paint and brushes from your cupboard and make ‘dot mandala.’ Here is how.https://neeramahajan.com/media/90ede2c32d1fb88bb80f8613ec135239

This is what Elizabeth Gilbert said on an Instagram message during the pandemic:

Create, create, create…” Don’t stop. 

This is the photo of what I created when I was facing some of the dark times in my life. When I was in the hospital waiting rooms, in funeral homes, in the middle of the night in despair, on airplanes far from home, while nursing a broken heart, when terrified, tired, when angry, when grieving. 

Constant creative response. This is how you keep the dance alive.

This is how you don’t get the stupidification to settle into your bones. Creativity is movement and movement is how we replace despair with a radical muscular engagement with life in life’s terms.

And this is what a young woman wrote in response to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Instagram message.

I used creativity to form communication with my neurological handicapped mother. She couldn’t speak hardly any words due to damage to her frontal lobe. She passed her time in a nursing home being an artist. 

My sibling and I gifted her Empty sketchbooks for years and we received them back as gifts. I learned to draw, to communicate with her. Plus she learned some sign language and music was the best sharing our souls with each other. 

Creativity expresses our emotions and creativity helps us heal. 

Music, art, writing theatrics and so many other ways. We can escape and make our own world. We find out who we really are. I am grateful my family encouraged my art at a young age. 

I am still an artist to this day. It has helped me through lots of hard times.

Feeling anxious with another lockdown?

Create some music.
Learn to draw.
Dance in your room.

Because this is how you get rid of worry and anxiety and thrive during a disaster.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Both my parents retired in their late fifties. After leading an active life for nearly forty years, they sank in the emptiness of retirement. They did what others of their generation were doing – lead a life of leisure. Unfortunately, it had an adverse effect. Their health deteriorated and their minds got stagnant. They lost a sense of purpose which led to boredom and eventually various illnesses.

When I ‘finished working’ early last year (I hate to call it retirement) almost at the same age my parents did, I was determined not to make the same mistake. I planned to use the third phase of my life doing things I always wanted to do, a concept well described in David Corbett’s groundbreaking book The Portfolio Life.

David Corbett, a thought leader on life transition, worked with senior executives from corporations, professional services, education, and government for many years. He observed that his clients often set their sights on “one more job” or career to set them up for a comfortable retirement but had little to say about what might happen when that goal was met. He found that people didn’t pay attention to their longevity track.

He wanted them to think long term.

The much-heralded gift of living longer in good health has opened up a whole new arena, a new adventure that could last for three or four decades after initial careers are done.

In his book The Portfolio Life, he shows a new way of thinking and living in extended middle age.

“Portfolio Life” offers a compelling alternative to traditional retirement.

Retirement was once relegated to winding down, but now it holds the promise of our most significant and passionate years, a time when we can be ourselves and contribute.

This new stage of life is made more meaningful when people crate a balance of work, learning, leisure and family time, giving back, and whatever else has been simmering on the back burner of their hearts and soul during their careers. The balance can be tailored to one’s personality and situation. I call this a life portfolio because it holds an intentional combination of passions and pursuits. Those who do best at it step back early on, question whatever they may have learned about “retirement,” envision new possibilities, and plan ahead.

If you are a lifelong learner and have a desire to make your life count in a deeply fulfilling way, you ought to consider leading a “portfolio life.”

Our life is not just the work, home and social commitments. It is a whole lot more than accumulating money and things.

Think of your life as a portfolio of activities, all of which make you who you are.

In a nutshell, a “portfolio life” is about who you are.

My portfolio, for instance, consists of writing, blogging, sketching, traveling, and teaching, not to mention the time spent with my family and friends, as well as on my hobbies and pastimes.

All of these things make me who I am, and without one, I’m not complete.

Thinking of my life as a portfolio of activities helps me embrace change and explore the possibilities that will come with an additional 20 to 30 productive years. I am living my life by design and on my own terms.

The so-called ‘retirement years’ are the best time to create a life expressly for yourself.

Once I had fulfilled my primary responsibilities of raising my children and looking after my parents I was free to devote the remaining years crafting a genuinely rich life doing things I always wanted to do.

Initially, I had just one passion – writing. I created a blog and started writing regularly. One thing led to another and I added sketching, cartooning, painting and teaching to my portfolio.

I am busier now than I was when I was in the workforce. I am working longer but looking healthier. I have never been as happy as I am now.

We are not only living longer and healthier lives but also tackling a life stage that did not exist twenty-five years ago. A new arena that could last three or four decades after our initial careers have ended.

According to Corbett, in the future, we will all be “portfolio people,” thinking of vocation not as a single career but rather as a whole body of work.

Instead of wasting the best time of your life in aimless activities, use it to create your “portfolio.”

So many of us have a career at the center of our lives for decades – probably since we left college. When we reach retirement we are often faced with the question, “What do I do now?”

The concept of ‘portfolio life” is a great way to find a new meaning for our lives.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

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It is close to mid-day and wind is blowing with a ferocity that reflects Mother Nature’s fury. The temperature today is going to soar to 37 degrees.

The grass fire that was brought under control at Pialligo yesterday (which led to the evacuation) has reignited and is showing a red alert.

Another one has broken out in Phillip, just 3 kms away from my home and is showing out-of-control in the Fire Alert App I have downloaded on my phone.

I wouldn’t have known but for my daughter who texted to alert me. That pressed the panic button. I should prepare to flee. If the wind brings fire to my direction, it will not take it long to reach my home. My non-existent fire plan has just two water hoses which will be completely ineffective in this wind. I will not be able to save the house that is evident. Fleeing is my only option.

If I am to run away, which will be at the notice of five-minutes, what will I take with me? It is a question like the one I tackled once in a writing workshop – if you find out you are going to die in six months, what will you do in those six months?

Just like I would live my life condensed in six months, I should pick up the things that matter the most. But which ‘things’ mattered the most? What should I take with me?

I go from room to room trying to figure out. What can I salvage and what can I leave at the mercy of the fires? Perhaps nothing. All that clutter, which is a cause so much frustration on a daily basis suddenly feels so endearing. This clutter is somehow attached to my identity. It can’t imagine my life without these unnecessary things I have collected over the years.

Or, can I?

I know fully-well that when the time comes, I will leave everything as it is. I will save my life and life of my loved ones more than anything else. And when I come back, after the havoc, to the site where my house stood one day, I will cry for their loss. The things I thought I couldn’t live without will now live in my memory and I will continue to live my life.

This is how versatile we are. We spend our lives working like mad, earning money so that we can buy lots of things, well aware that none of them matter. Yet it is so hard to part with them. They do have some sort of meaning in our lives. Our possessions root us. To the place where we live. They bring a sense of belonging. Without them, we feel empty.

Maybe this trait of defining our identity with the stuff we accumulate separates us from other animals whose existence is complete without any possession. While ours depend on our possessions. The more we have, the more settled we feel.

As I think of these wild thoughts, I begin to understand the agony of hundreds of people who have lost their houses to fires in the last few weeks. The whole nation is mourning over their loss but as Joan Didion said, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”

Winds are getting fiercer and fiercer. I am feeling a curious blend of anxiety and calmness. It is one of those moments when you just want to leave everything in God’s hands and resort to prayer. A place of hope at a time of helplessness.

I move from room to room making a mental note of things I should grab if I have the time and the inclination to do it but make no move to gather them in boxes as I did seventeen-years-ago when a terrible fire took Canberra in its grip and burned hundreds of houses. While I do that I take pictures of the ‘things’ in each room so that I could morn them if fires consume them.

I wish you well. I pray for your homes to remain safe. And I beg forgiveness from Mother Nature.