A fulfilling life and building a framework for living

 Arun Kumar

Pixabay

In my mind’s eye, I keep visiting the moonless nights in St. Croix when we looked at the sky and were dazzled and awed by the sheer number of stars sprinkled in the darkness above. Here in Maryland, living does not offer that privilege. Being here, and working, does bring in the paycheck and the roof above the head. In return, I pay the price of not sensing the vastness in which I live. 

Living in the boxes that cities could be, we miss the opportunity of nature making us feel humble. Not confronting the infinite, we miss the privilege to ask ourselves the question, who are we.

While standing on the porch of Leigh’s Leap, what those moonless nights in St.Croix offered was a sense of how expansive space and time are, and within that, how fleeting are the moments of our existence.

The growing realization of my mortality, and yet, not being at ease with the realization has created a dissonance within. A nagging feeling of unease that something is not right. It feels that from the 1000 piece puzzle we bought a couple of days back, a piece has gone missing.  Just to be mischievous, perhaps the dog who was at our house for a week swallowed that one piece.

The dissonance is a great recipe for introspection, and this one is no exception. 

Introspection, although discombobulating, however, offers hope of finding a way to live that could bring the two opposites - the realization of mortality, and what to do with the time I have left - in harmony. Introspection also offers hope for reconciliation between the sense of finiteness that exists within us and the vastness that is out there.

Through introspection there is a hope for inventing a personal algebra that sums the totality of our days, and engagements within them, into something that is non-zero.  Introspection, perhaps, will be the antidote for the dissonance within. It is a path for personal salvation.

These moments of introspection start to happen more frequently as we get older and have a clearer vision that life is not forever that it once seemed to be. Our end is no longer a distant object shimmering in the fog anymore. Our failing eyes make us visit the optometrist often, but they give us no trouble seeing the distant shimmer of our mortality. In that, our vision keeps getting better.

One outcome I could seek through introspection is to find a framework for living that will make me feel at peace with the knowledge that this body is just a form that I have taken in the present. The things that make it existed before and will exist afterwards. A framework that gives me the wherewithal to close my eyes and feel the continuum of space and time. A framework that brings occasional moments of  transcendental experience, the experience of being connected with everything else. 

My dreams from introspection for now, however, are more modest - finding a framework for living.

For now, I just seek a framework of living through one day. A framework that will make me look forward to getting up in the morning, and at the end of the day when turning off the lights, brushing teeth, and curling under the softness of freshly washed cotton sheets, allow myself that it was a day well spent. It was a day I will not mind living tomorrow. 

Finding that framework is a modest goal of the current introspective journey. 

Days add up into a week, a month, a year, and to the rest of the lifetime. If I can figure out the recipe for a day well lived, near the end when the candle of our life is near its last flicker, I can perhaps say it was a life well lived. 

Of course, finding that framework is not easy. It could be particularly difficult at some turns in life, e.g. at the start of retirement when for the first time in our life, we really have to shape a new identity with our own hands. Retirement could be a perfect storm - a loss of identity, nothing in hand, no anchors,  and on top of that,  an awareness of mortality.

Along the way I also need to remind myself to keep things simple. Keep eyes on the goal I am seeking and not get lost in mazes within a mazes that introspection and philosophy could be. 

At the end of the road, there is an algebra that sums the day to a positive number. The task is to figure that algebra out.

Ciao.

Related:

Self-Introspection

A fulfilling life and finding another god in retirement

To retire or not to retire

There will come a day to leave the temple

of work behind,

stand outside and say 

adieu, 

to the god

that rules within

blessing the faithful

with identity and purpose

however real, apparent, 

or perhaps,

surreal.

If you don’t,
there will still come a day

they will carry you out

on their shoulders

directly to the pyre

so you can return 

the atoms you borrowed
back to the universe.

Between the two 

- to retire or not to retire -

It is hard to pick

one over the other,

but so easy to dawdle,

and feel blue.

A fulfilling life and finding another god in retirement

 Arun Kumar

Pixabay

A long time ago, we used to roam the African savannas, and life probably was not all a bed of roses.

 

If I were to imagine, the daily routine of our ancestors was tied up with rising and setting of the sun. The day was spent hunting and gathering for food, keeping themselves safe from predators, taking care of their offspring to propagate their precious genes. In all likelihood, there was no luxury of discretionary time to sit under a tree, chill, and enjoy the green vistas stretching out in front of us or gaze at the sky and see the march of thousand brilliant stars every night.

Having discretionary time at our disposal is a trait that emerged only recently. One of the paradigm shifts in the trajectory of human evolution may have been gaining the luxury of discretionary time.

But there is no free lunch. Every good thing (assuming discretionary time is one) could hide a darker side. There is always a yin for the  yang.  The luxury of having discretionary time could easily come with the dilemma: what to do with it? Not just do something, but have an engagement that feels fulfilling and meaningful.

Getting older magnifies the conundrum of discretionary time at hand and could easily become a debilitating condition.

The amount of discretionary time at our disposal increases by an order of magnitude in the years subsequent to our retirement. And so does the urgency of trying to figure out ways to engage that time. Unfortunately, not all of us may be well skilled for this task.

By the time we reach retirement, or start to think about retirement, we have been working for 30+ years. Over that time, work slowly becomes our life. It becomes our identity; it gives our life a purpose; it is an anchor that does not let us feel adrift; it becomes our social connection, sometimes the only one.

Slowly, and in imperceptible ways, work becomes our personal god and religion. When the time comes, it is wrenching to leave the god behind and to disown the religion we converted to. 

One day, however, whether we like it or not, the god of work has to be let go. For some, rules of retirement make it necessary, for others, the body may start to complain, or it could just be the general weariness of dealing with the same old same old.  Whatever the reason, one evening we find ourselves standing outside the building we thought was our temple, look at it in a forlorn way, and slowly walk away knowing that we would not be back tomorrow.

A new life of post retirement begins. After a few months into it, as our  honeymoon period with retirement passes and the passions start to cool down, we are confronted with the need to find another temple, and another god within. It also dawns that it is less of finding a temple than it is the process of building one with our own hands. However, either we never had the right carpentry skills to handle the task, or if we had, our hands are now too  rusty.

Having the right skills or not, we have to find another temple, another god, another religion to become our anchor.

Retirement, and the prospects of a handful of discretionary time in our hands, could be an unnerving experience. At least, it was for me. And if the newly minted profession of retirement coaches is any indication, it is a prevalent problem.

Getting closer to retirement, and thinking about the seemingly endless march of days ahead without quite knowing what to do with the abundance of time at hand, threw me completely off balance. What would I do - travel more, become a Zen gardener or a gourmet cook, read and read and read, watch movies, spend more time keeping up with my health, spend more time with nature - all kinds of options were there, but something did not seem to jive. None of them seemed to provide an anchor to life, give a sense of meaning and purpose. It just seemed like that inside of me lacks the right receptors to feel engaged with different available options.

Take reading and learning about new things. A question would come up: what for? When young, reading and learning have an innate purpose. It gives us the skill  to eventually earn a living. But now, doing the same for its own sake, did not seem motivating.

Perhaps, staring starkly in the face of our mortality deprives things of the flavors they previously carried.

After a period of inner struggle, going down the dead end trails, it is only now that I have begun to dig myself out. One specific approach that helped was the slow recognition of portfolio engagements that made me feel that going through the day brought a sense of fulfillment. 

One class of such engagements was doing something that brought back  the feeling of being creative, e.g., writing - be it journaling, slowly working through a potential blog post, snippets of thoughts written as poems. Days when I can sit quietly for a while with my fingers at the keyboard for a few hours calmed the fluttery soul, and brought  a sense of peace.

On the weekends when I am able to spend a few hours in the morning writing,  it brings the feeling that the day  is now anchored, and with that, I can wander the rest of the day. 

Slowly, it also dawned that writing created a healthy ecosystem of engagements around itself that support each other. Writing gives a purpose to reading and learning, Writing also prompts to dig deeper into specific subjects. The most frequented website lately might be Wikipedia.  

And most importantly, writing also keeps my gray matter, oh well, gray.

It is a beautiful feeling to have an ecosystem of engagements where different components support one another and like etchings of E. M. Escher, blend into each other. 

The important notion for finding the  recipe to walk away from the temple of our work life, to leave a god we have known for a long time behind, and to once again to have a peaceful heart, is to find the right combination of engagements to spend the day. A combination  that makes us want to get out of the bed in winter mornings and have something to look forward to.

The hard part is that in retirement we have to build our own temple, create our own identity, and have an answer to the question -  So Arun, what are you doing these days?

Ciao.

Keeping the flame alive

The richness of life comes from choosing to live  while keeping the awareness  of mortality, alive.

True grit

True grit is living
while facing
our mortality.

Beyond this trail

Why is it now  when limbs are weak  and thoughts are frail,  I wonder what comes beyond this trail.

Autocorrect faux pas

You know it is time to dust up the keyboard and get rid of dead hairs, procreating, when their tangled mess autocorrected “your dimples” to “your nipples”  and landed you in a boatload of trouble that you could have  done without.

Knowing the texture of my days

There is an urge

to feel 

the texture of days

between my fingers

soft, firm, a bit slimy, or just slippery

like grains of sand

and then

after a proper assessment

put them in the bins

marked dark, desolate, normal, or gay

for tomorrow when I call

my horse whisperer

she would ask how 

I have been doing lately and

decide on my pills for upcoming days. 

Existential crisis, the beginning #4

With wrinkly skin

and a feeble mind

the day I crossed 

sixty nine

I wondered about

the grand design.