Is worry wearing you down?

Neera

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.

Image by the author

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.

Image by autor

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

Your life in boxes

Neera

When Karl Friedrich Mercedes applied for a patent for the world’s first automobile in 1886, he was forty-two years old.

It was against the law to drive a car at that time. He needed a letter from the King to drive his own invention. And there were no roads, no gas stations, no all-night drives to liquor stores.

He should have waited.

Should he?

He knew he was onto the fourth box of his life. How many more he would be handed out? Who knew?

Tim Urban, a writer, and a fellow blogger came with an interesting concept about our life in boxes which I first read about in Niklas Goke’s post.

Let’s say you are going to live for 100 years and each decade is represented by a box, then your whole life is just 10 boxes.

If you look at your life this way it is very easy to see, that the first three boxes of your life are gone learning to walk, talk, getting educated and landing a job.

The last two are write-off too; because you are learning to walk and talk once again perhaps struggling to remember where you left your glasses or whether you had your lunch or not.

The only boxes when you have the possibility to do anything worthwhile with your life are the five in the middle.

Even out of those, three are taken up to raise children, building a career, maintaining a social life and building a nest of eggs.

That leaves you just two boxes when you have the chance to do what you really want to do. That too if you are aware of it. Most of the people think that their sixties and seventies are to hang their boots and live a leisurely life.

Karl Mercedes knew how little time he had to turn his dreams into reality.

Although his car was nothing more than a three-wheeled bicycle running with a motor, Benz began to sell it from the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history.

Rather than planning and using those golden decades of their lives, most people just squander those away thinking what could be done in mere two decades.

Karl Mercedes spent next two decades perfecting his design. In 1909, his car, Blitzen Benz set a record of 226.91 km/h (141.94 mph) and was said to be “faster than any plane, train, or automobile” at the time.

Two decades is a long time if you are serious about following your passion. A degree in Medicine only takes seven years to complete, Economics just four, Law only three. With concentrated effort, a book can be written within a year. You can write twenty in two decades if you want to.

Even if you had no control over eight boxes of your life, if you want, you can control your sixties and seventies.

Make these two decades count, and your life will be worth remembering.

Photo by Jan Laugesen on Unsplash

What kind of a writer are you?

Neera

Have you ever wondered why it takes you a long time to write a single blog post whereas you can fill pages and pages in your journal in no time? Or why is it that you can’t get around to finish your novel which you were so passionate about when you started and now that you have all the time in the world but you keep procrastinating.

As beginner writers, we start so many projects and never get around to finish them. Many times we quickly lose interest in ideas that excited us so much when we first conceived them. We waste countless hours over many years wondering why doesn’t our desire to write translate into a career.

Well, you might think it is because you don’t have time to write or you’re not a good writer or writing doesn’t pay well hence there is no reason to pursue a career in it.

But that is not the reason writing is not working for you.

You will be surprised to know that the answer lies in figuring out what kind of writer you are.

My writing idol, Shaunta Grimes, came with an interesting theory in an article on Medium (an online magazine). She claimed that every writer falls into one of five archetypes. Knowing your archetype will help you determine what kind of writing you should be doing in order to excel at it. According to her, understanding your archetype makes you a better writer and more importantly a happier writer.

I must admit, at the beginning of her article, I was skeptical. I didn’t think I would fall into any one category because my writing is all over the place. I write fiction, non-fiction, diary, journals, blogs, articles. There was no way I could fit into any of those archetypes. But as I continued reading I not only began to agree with her but was surprised to find that I belong to the same archetype as my her.

Not only that, all this time, I wasn’t even aware of my own strength and interest as a writer.

So what are these five archetypes?

They are:

  • Hesitater
  • Skipper
  • Spiller
  • Teacher
  • Artist

This is how Shaunta Grimes describes them:

The Hesitater is one that has trouble getting started. They want badly to be writers and they think about it a lot, but for whatever reason, they can’t seem to get the momentum going to actually pull the trigger and start writing with any real consistency. Facebook Groups for writers and MFA programs are full of Hesitaters.

The Skipper are those who skip all over the place — they write about one topic today and another one tomorrow. Their happy place is having an assignment. Skippers are often journalists, freelancers, ghostwriters, or copywriters — working for a paycheck or with a contract and always knowing that they’ll be paid for their work.

The Spiller put a strong emphasis on being confessional. When they write, they spill their guts on the page. Often their purpose is healing and they want to let readers know they aren’t alone in the world. There is someone else out there feeling what they feel or who has experienced what they are experiencing — and that matters to them, a lot.

The Teacher writes with a strong emphasis on teaching. They want readers to come away having learned something. As a result, they have trouble writing about things that they’re not either an expert or strongly invested in learning. The Teacher needs an audience who expects to hear from them on a regular basis. On many levels, it’s the connection that feeds them. Because if their goal is to teach, they want to know they’re reaching other people and they’re learning from them.

The Artist’s main focus is the craft of writing. If the Spiller writes mostly for themselves and the Teacher writes mostly for their audience, the Artist writes mostly for their muse. This writer crafts their work and presents it to the world, much in the same way that a fine artist might hang paintings in a gallery. They tend to be focused on their readers individually. They want to entertain and delight. Lyrical, literary, poetic prose is this writer’s happy place.

Every writer falls into one of five archetypes by Shaunta Grimes.

It turns out I am a Teacher writer. Whatever I write, I write with the intent to explain. My utmost passion is to teach others what I have learned. My diaries and journals are full of things I tried and implemented in my life, whether they are personal development, meditative and spiritual practices, writing or sketching skills.

Shuanta Grimes is also a Teacher writer. She writes from her personal experiences and she writes to teach. And she is full of ideas.

Like her, I am also getting bombarded by ideas — my own ideas as well as other people’s ideas. So many ideas that it is hard to keep track of them. That is why I believe blogging is a great platform for Teacher writers like me because we are so excited to share what we’ve learned. It enables us to write fast and publish prolifically.

Teachers are the writers who seek to build a community. We have our readers at the top of our mind when we write. Without readers, we feel that there is no purpose for our work. Teachers need students, after all.

Even when a Teacher writes fiction, their desire to reach out to the reader and share their ideas is apparent. They can’t help teaching what they’ve learned. Children’s book writers are often Teachers. Shuanta Grimes writes fiction for children. It is understandable to teach children through fiction. But I write fiction for adults, and even in my writing, I am teaching through my characters. There are several other teacher writers writing for adults. Diana Gabaldon, Helen Garner … are to name a few.

Now the funny thing with these archetypes is that you jump from one category to another at different times. I was a Hesitater for a long time, then for a period, I was a Skipper, and now along with being a Teacher, I am also a bit of Spiller. A lot of my writing is confessional. Over time I have learned that writing is great therapy and I am not afraid to spill my guts out in order to heal and in order to teach. Writing has made me fearless to an extent.

Now the question is what kind of writer you are?

It might be possible you are an Artist writer, with a strong focus on the language. My friend Moria falls into this category. She writes beautiful well-crafted sentences. Another of my writing buddy, Fiona, describes nature as Shirley Bassey sings Diamonds Are Forever, boldly and beautifully. I, on the other hand, do not possess that kind of command on the language. But I do not let that stop me from telling stories I want to tell.

You might be a Hesitater or a Skipper, in that case, you know where you stand what you need to do to get to where you want to go. As Shuanta says both Hesitater or a Skipper is the interim phase before you move on to be a Spiller, Teacher or an Artist. Once you know your archetype you will know what to write and how to establish your writing career.

Read her full article to learn more.

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Are you feeling lonely?

Neera

In this world full of people, so many of us feel so lonely at times.

The current climate of self-isolation is not helping. We need innovative ways to stay connected. To keep that human connection going is not easy for shy people even at the best of times.

I read two stories last week that might get you thinking about how to combat your loneliness.

The first one is A bird feeder for humans from Austin Kleon’s blog:

A few years ago, after reading in a book that people who feel a strong sense of community have been proven to lead longer and happier lives, Maria Bamford started working to overcome her natural shyness and fear of interaction by saying hello to her neighbors in Eagle Rock, a diverse and partly gentrified area on the northeastern edge of Los Angeles. She bought a park bench and had it installed on the median strip in front of her house. She then spray-stenciled the words “Have a Seat!” on the sidewalk in front of it. To her delight, the bench is often occupied. “It’s like a birdfeeder for humans,” she says.

A 2014 New York Times Megazine Profile
Maria Bamford’s Bench

Two things became obvious from this snippet. One, you need to do some effort on your part to stay connected. And second, innovation goes a long way.

Here is the second story, that illustrates how Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of Eat Pray and Love feels connected to her houseplant during her self-isolation.

When I got this plant, eight years ago, she was such a tiny thing. My world was a totally different place back then, and so was hers. When she was little, her leaves barely reached out of the pot that she was in – a pot that seemed comically over-large for her at the time. Now she takes up so much space that I have to duck under her great reaching fronds in order to get to my socks out of the drawer beneath her.

How can something become so beautiful, just by staying in one place, surviving only on light and water? How can something that is so still and quiet feel like such an explosion of beauty and energy? I have spent the last eight years running in fast circles around the world – laughing, sobbing, striving, bouncing from drama to drama. All the while she has sat right here with a very different agenda – and looks at what she as become.

Over the last eight years that I have been alone in this house, I have been looking at her a lot. I’ve been listening to her. She has been my friend and my teacher. She has a great sense of humor, She’s really good at being quiet. She is really good at patience and trust. She has all the answers.

Experts say that loneliness is a complex emotional phenomenon that has its bases in survival during childhood. All of us have experienced some degree of abandonment if only for a short time, and remember the painful and scary feeling that goes along with it.

If that is what you are experiencing during self-isolation then it might help to act on some of the suggestions readily available online.

Realize that loneliness is a feeling, not a fact. When you are feeling lonely, it is because something has triggered a memory of that feeling, not because you are in fact, isolated and alone. The brain is designed to pay attention to pain and danger, and that includes painful scary feelings; therefore loneliness gets our attention.

Reach out because loneliness is painful and can confuse you into thinking self-defeating thoughts. Try writing as a means of getting them out of your system. It will help to get active, ring someone and do some small talk, connect with some like-minded people on online forums, read a good book, hang out with someone non-human, do some volunteering and plan at least one social activity a week.

Keep in mind you need to look after yourself before anyone else can look after you.

This world is a beautiful place, you don’t need to keep on staring at ugliness. Look for the beauty around you and focus on that.

Ms Jolly. You will see more of her in future posts.

Photo by Meagan Ranson on Unsplash

Is your self-isolation becoming like groundhog day?

Neera 1 Comment

In the US and Canada, according to a tradition, on February 2nd, when the groundhog emerges from hibernation, if it sees its shadow, it returns to its burrow for six weeks as a sunny day indicates a late spring, while a cloudy day would mean an early spring.

Groundhog day is the same day over and over again.

The term was made famous by the 1993 movie of the same name (Groundhog Day) starring Bill Murray.

In the movie, Bill Murray is a weatherman who gets stuck in a time loop and wakes up every morning on February 2nd – Groundhog Day. He tries everything but he can’t make out of the town or get on to the next day.

No matter what he does, he still wakes up in the same bed every morning to face the same day.

In a moment of despair, he turns to a couple of drunks at a bowling alley bar and askes them, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

Is that how you feel about your days?

You wake up each morning and do the same things over and over again. Nothing seems to progress and you feel like getting stuck in a time loop like the weatherman.

You want to find a way to get out of this loop.

You want to make your day count. You want to be productive. You want your work to matter.

Surprisingly your problem is your answer.

Productive people don’t have a magic wand, they have a routine they strictly follow. Their days are groundhog days. But they use the monotony to accomplish whatever they have set for themselves.

Going to work gives you a routine, that is the reason you are able to achieve more when you get out of your house and go to the workplace where you deliver output.

Working from home takes away that structure.

You need to bring that structure while working from home to be productive. You need to develop a daily routine.

Productive people have a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on and they work for it no matter what. Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored, or acclaimed, they know they’ll still get up tomorrow and do their work.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it.

It might seem like a stretch but the best thing we can do is to make our own version of Groundhog day.

We have no control over tomorrow and yesterday is gone, but today is in our grasp. We can do what we want to do, today.

Richmond Walker wrote in his daily meditation book Twenty-Four Hours a Day, “Any man can fight the battles of just one day… Let us, therefore, do our best to live but one day at a time.”

Photo by Abigail Lynn on Unsplash

At times like these, what can you do?

Neera

We are going through unprecedented times in the history of mankind. Never before the whole world had come to a standstill in a matter of a few weeks. Never before countries have shut down their borders, companies have ordered their employees to work from home, and airlines have grounded their fleet and stood down their workforces.

And this is just a tiny snippet of what is going on.

Thousands of people have died.

Each day the news is more grave, more devastating.

At times like these, the natural tendency is to reach for more news. But is it the best way to face this crisis?

Staying up-to-date with news is a good thing: we need to know the seriousness of the situation and what authorities are asking us to do to limit the spreading of the virus.

But too much news is an invitation to negativity in life.

Negativity breeds more negativity which causes dread, panic, and anger, the very things we need to avoid.

At times like these, we need to be compassionate, understanding, and grateful.

Social distancing and self-isolation have provided a unique opportunity to slow down and reflect. Not the usual kind of slowing down and reflecting we are expected to do with mindfulness training but a deeper kind encompassing the whole humanity.

We are the most resilient species on this planet. We have come out of many crises before. We will come out of this one too.

Yes, this one is not like anyone before.

Yes, the worst hasn’t even arrived yet.

Yes, the economic impact of this pandemic will be more than anyone could imagine at the moment.

But we will come out of it by staying together, looking after each other, helping each other, responding to it like a unit, by fighting it together.

What can a writer do to make a difference?

At times like these, a writer’s job is to spread hope.

You should observe, listen, think and then write. The lesson we learn fighting crises like these must be captured for the next generations.

Write the stories of what is going around you.

Write the stories of people clapping from their balconies to hail our nurses, doctors, and health professionals for the care they are providing to the sick and vulnerable.

Write the stories of people singing to each other across the empty squares, keeping their windows open, so that those who are alone may hear the sound of family around them.

Write the stories of hotels and restaurant owners who are offering free meals and delivery to the housebound and of the young woman who is busy spreading flyers with her phone number through the neighborhood so that the elders may have someone to call on.

Write the stories of churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are preparing to welcome and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.

You should write, and you should write like never before.

You should write letters to your great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren telling them how humanity got together to fight a crisis like never before.

You should tell them how a total stranger in the supermarket gave you the last can of tomatoes.

You should tell them that working from home, you put in extra, extra hours even when no one was counting because you were grateful you still have a job and you want to give more to your employer who is going through a bigger hardship to keep his business afloat.

You write to them that you kept on working even when your employer couldn’t pay you because you thought that is the best use of your time and it might help your employer to save the business.

That you learned to live with less, learned to spend more time at home, learned to waste less.

You should write from the heart. So when your great-grandchildren ask you what did you do when the crisis hit, you can tell them that you. spread hope.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash