In dreams I am a hero

 Arun Kumar

Cabo da Roca. I am told this is the westernmost point in continental Europe. It may just be a gimmick to popularize this place in travel books. A distinction a traveler can take back home and say to their friends that look I visited something unique, and now, I carry another badge of honor on my chest.

Or it may indeed be the westernmost point in continental Europe. Either way, it is a stunning place to be.

Standing high on the rocky cliff looking at the blue waters of the Atlantic, strong gusts of wind rush around wanting to lift me even higher. The blue horizon and I think I can see our home on the other side of the Atlantic.

I am glad that on the spur of the moment, while taking a trip to Cascais, I decided to come here. The rocks I stand would also be the farthest point away from home during this trip.

If you think of it, every trip away from home has the farthest point that we reach, turn back, and start the journey back to home. It is like throwing a stone up in the sky and following the laws of nature, the stone makes a graceful arch, reaches its highest point, and returns back to Earth, its home.

I am that stone.

High above the blue waters of the Atlantic, for a moment, I feel glad that I made this journey and actualized it from merely being a plan into a reality.

It is not always so. Sometimes I just keep dreams for the sake of dreaming and am in no hurry to crystallize them into diamonds they could be.

Unrealized dreams have a certain warmth to them. They can be an anchor that does not let us drift. They are the safe harbor we can fly back to when at the end of the day, the sun starts to descend. On occasions, they can be something for us to look forward to when we wake up in the morning.

During the day, they become daydreams to bring solace under the summer sky; they become fluffy clouds that float by and offer moments of shade.

Why actualize dreams when they have so much to offer. And who knows, dreams turned into reality may not be something they promised to be.

In The Alchemist there is a crystal merchant who is a middle-aged man living in Tangier and gives Santiago, the protagonist, a badly needed job. The crystal merchant’s dream is to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. However, he does not want to fulfill his dream because he thinks he would have nothing left to live for if he did go to Mecca and realized his dream.

This story encapsulates another niche of emotions dreams can fill. While dreaming, it feels like there is always something we can start tomorrow. The possibility is always there. If we actualize the dream today, tomorrow we may have to face our fears of emptiness. What next? Where do you go from here?

Perhaps, the same happens with our tendency for making endless plans and not taking the steps to lay the first few stones of what may turn out to be the next Taj Mahal. Well, not really that majestic, but still.

Somewhere, there is also a fear in taking the first step out from the dreamworld that after all, we may not be up to the task and might fail.

I want to write but feel afraid that I may not have ideas worth penning. In the end, what I will end up with would be two pages worth of mindless drivel.

Taking the first step, going from plans to taking the first step is also breaking the laws of motion — inertia. It is so much easier to keep doing what I am doing — dream — than to make a change.

In dreams and endless plans, I am a hero. In them, I do not fail. The promise of something is so much sweeter than the reality may turn out to be. Why tempt pricking the balloon?

While thinking of realizing dreams, it is easy to fall prey to the finistophobia — emotion of fear generated by anticipation of endings often followed by a sense of emptiness.

But …

…then I look back, a lesson from my own personal history tells me that taking actions often is the seed for new challenges and opens up more possibilities. Endings end up becoming new beginnings.

I need not be afraid of the prospect of emptiness. The universe offers an infinite number of challenges to pick from.

Oftentimes, finishing an article gives ideas for two more to follow.

While I stand on the edge of the cliffs at Cabo da Roca and look at the horizon far away where sky touches the turquoise water, and as the wind caresses my face, it all looks so much better than it was in my dreams.

On the journey back, I started to dream of visiting Diamond Head the next year.

One dream is realized and in its wake another dream sprouts.

Ciao.

Soft and hard (of retirement)

 

Arun Kumar

As far as I know, the wheel of life gets a single turn between birth and death, and after completing that one cycle, it self-destructs.

In doing so, the wheel goes through the innocent years of childhood, the learning years of youth followed by the years of building a career, and finally, if all goes well, then hopes of living many years enjoying a contemplative retirement.

For retirement years we nurse a dream that we would sit back, relax, and live a life on our own terms.

Perhaps we will, but only if we do spend time and effort in preparing for the outcome we dream for, thereby increasing the probability of its being realized.

It is important to recognize that the dream of spending years in retirement sitting on the porch in a rocking chair watching orange and purple sunsets is not a natural outcome of evolution that brought us here. Retirement is a modern construct and does not have any teleological reasoning to exist.

The notion of retirement is a consequence of the accelerated pace at which human evolution has progressed. By doing that, we have disassociated ourselves from the much slower pace of the process of natural selection that molds the development of our skills necessary to propagate the genes in response to the environment we live in.

Within a time span of the last 200-years or so, improvements in the basic hygiene practices, advances in medicine and vaccination, have resulted in us living much longer than our DNA and genes really require us to do.

200 years ago, the concept of retirement did not exist. How to best deal with a longer life span is something that the evolutionary process did not prepare us for. In developing skills required to have a successful retirement, we are entirely at our own wits.

A fundamental requirement that comes with living longer is a continual need for resources to keep us functioning. These resources are the calories we need to keep our cells humming. In the past this need was met by hunting and gathering. But not anymore.

In earlier days, as we got older and our limbs began to get weaker and we were no longer agile enough to surprise an impala or walk miles to forage fruit and berries at the other end of the forest, it was a call for our inevitable demise.

But now as we have evolved, the rules by which we find calories have changed. We no longer go to the forest to hunt and gather to meet our incessant need for resources. Hunting and gathering has been replaced by bartering our skills with money being the intermediary unit that facilitates the task.

Now, to meet the energy requirements for cells we need money. The rows of trees in the forest have now been replaced by the aisles in the supermarket, and instead of hunting with a bow and arrow the choice weapon is a credit card.

We now need to have money and have plenty of it to be able to realize the dreams of sitting in the rocking chair on the porch.

There is no free lunch. With an increasing life span living could be an expensive endeavor requiring lots of money.

Longevity is a double-edged sword. It is an opportunity to enjoy time, expand our horizons, re-engage in activities that may have fallen by the wayside, but doing so is going to require money to barter for calories.

Long winded story, but the bottom line is that in retirement years, to be able to meet our tangible and intangible energy requirements, we better plan to have money before we get there.

To drive the message home there is plenty of advice out there. We are told to:

● Start saving for retirement early.

● Make regular contributions from the monthly income and make that the highest priority.

● Live within the means and do not get saddled by debt.

● Invest money to make it grow and not fall behind and let it get blighted by inflation.

● When investing, aim for the long term, diversify, and periodically, rebalance.

● As you get older, adjust the risk profile of the portfolio.

● Be agile and adjust as needed.

● And do not trust your gut feelings when investing. Investing is a game where not reacting to visceral feelings is a virtue.

I wonder if squirrels are given similar advice when they hoard nuts to get through the winter. Even if they are not, the advantage for them, however, is that they live through winters many times and have a chance to get it right. We do not have the same luxury of living through many cycles of the wheel of life and learn from our mistakes.

Naturally being wise individuals, we read the books and implemented all the good financial strategies, bought a rocking chair and are all set to sit in it, blast off and enjoy the ride but…

Whenever there is a “but” at the end of a sentence, there is a possibility for a different perspective that follows.

…but then the engines sputter. It turns out that there is more to realizing the dream retirement than just money to meet our energy (physical) requirements.

Here are how the events play out for lots of people who retire.

We may not think about it but psychologically after a long career entering the last phase of life could be a seismic and a discombobulating event.

Over the years, our work and career morph into a temple of sorts. As for offerings, we give our own heart and soul on the altar. In return, the temple bestows upon us important blessings — a sense of meaning and purpose; an identity; a sense of recognition; a place to compete and be the leader of a pack; a place to belong to a tribe; a structure to our life. The list of blessings the temple of work offers is long and becomes an important religion that we follow conscientiously.

The moment of retirement is when all these blessings get taken away. The day we walk out of the temple for the last time, along with handing over the badge and the laptop, we also relinquish everything that the temple blessed us.

Paradoxically, entering retirement and in the last phase of our life, we become newborns again. Being a newborn, psychologically we are ill prepared for life ahead and find that financial preparedness is not the only thing we are going to need for a happy retirement.

We do not know how we are going to fill the discretionary time that we had looked forward to. The time affluence, suddenly, does not look so romantic anymore.

There we stand looking quite baffled, needing to build another temple with our own hands, and in there, build and install our new identity, a new purpose etc. If not prepared, building such an edifice is a daunting task.

To make matters worse, this is probably the first time in our life that we have to build a temple with our hands. It does not take too long to realize that we do not have a bricklayer’s hand. We either never had the required tools, or if did, the skills were lost somewhere in the attics of the past.

Similar to advice we are given to secure the financial side of the retirement life, would it not be good if we were also told of strategies to follow and also develop the soft side of retirement — building an identity, finding a purpose, establishing social connections, feeling needed, having some temporal structure to our days?

The good news is that there is plenty of advice out there for this also. Fortunately, the process parallels that for putting together a secure financial nest egg, sprinkled with some added condiments.

● Start early and invest regular time and effort in pondering what the post-retirement life could be like. What would we do with the sudden luxury of time affluence?

● Regularly Visualize and ponder over the psychological side if you were to the retire, for example, if suddenly work was taken away would you be able to manage?

● Before retiring, put together a portfolio of engagements and activities that you could easily slide into.

● Keep a long perspective when investing in the psychological aspects of retirement.

● As you and your attitudes change, rebalance the portfolio of engagements.

● Take some weeks off and occasionally give a test drive to the portfolio of engagements and see how they feel? Be agile and make tweaks as necessary. Live in your personal temple and see if you can breathe as easily as you are breathing now.

● And first and foremost, do not trust your gut feelings and tell yourself, nah, when time comes, you have the wherewithal to figure out what your new temple would be.

If you do, there could be a nasty surprise waiting for you. One of the rockers in the rocking chair would come with a misalignment and the chair would wobble.

Ciao.

AP is a place to be

 

In July 2021, on an auspicious day
when the moon felt lucky
and the mood was gay
I had jumped into the river AP
to share some words
that constantly circled in the air
like a flock of birds.

I didn't quite know
what to expect
but secretly hoped
that by my post tenth
I will be among the best,
no longer be a ghost
I will be a darling of masses
like a crunchy buttered toast.

And indeed,
on my second post
there came some comments
that were worth some boast.

I said to the self
there you see
you are well on the way
to become a poster child
and will longer be a
lost voice in the wild.

The day dream kept soaring
until I realized
that the comments were
from the group of AP greeters
and there was no need
to get quiet so high;

AP greeters are there
to welcome the newbies
and lend them an ear
and not them peter.

It was a bit of damper
on my dreams of glory
but words persevered
to tell this story.

And with my post 100
to say thank you all
for your comments
and not letting me fall
and more so to say
AP is a place to be
so come and stay. 

The boiling frog metaphor and work life

 

Arun Kumar

We all have heard the metaphor of a frog in a pan of water sitting on a burner and temperature is slowly being raised by a fraction of degrees every so often. The metaphor goes that the frog, being a cold-blooded animal, whose body temperature keeps pace with the ambient temperature, would not feel the slow rise in the temperature, will sit placidly in the warming water and will eventually die as its cell functions gradually fail.

Whether the metaphor is true or false, it does not really matter. The point is that this metaphor is used in various contexts that humans, even with much higher levels of cognitive ability compared to a frog, also fail to recognize slow changes even if those changes have adverse influence eventually.

Take the debate about the potential influence of climate change on humans and the environment. A 2oC change in the mean temperature over 100 years falls in the category of meh, what is the big deal.

Indeed, it is true that gradual changes are hard to perceive on a daily basis, nonetheless, every instant they are happening all around and within us. The basic tenet of living organisms is continuous change.

A few weeks ago, I went on a trip for ten days. When I returned, all of the summer plants in the garden looked so much taller. It was as if they knew I was not around and together they conspired to grow faster and surprise me on my return. And they did. The first sentence I said when I saw them was — look much taller they became in ten days.

I am sure if I had stayed home and watched those plants every day, I would not have perceived their gradual growth. The impression after ten days would have been different, and I would have muttered to myself — are they ever going to grow and bloom before the summer is over?

Life looked through a series of snapshots separated in time gives a different impression than if watched continuously.

I am a victim of imperceptible changes without recognizing their consequences in another important way that catches many of us by surprise. It is how over the years, gradually the work life becomes all-encompassing and ends up becoming our identity, our purpose, and our meaning.

Looking back, I have no idea how and when this transformation happened. Slowly the tentacles of work life edged out other engagements in life.

I used to have time, and an interest in reading and used to read at least 20 books in a year. As years of working life went by that number kept going down. Reading ended up merely flipping through a stack of unread issues of Time (that kept getting deposited in the mailbox on a weekly basis) that I would carry with me on work travels to someplace.

The consequence of complete takeover of work over all aspects of life became clear when the prospects of leaving work (i.e., retirement) started to become real and the notion that one day work life will no longer be there came as a rude shock. The realization was like when sometimes we wake up after a deep sleep and for a few moments do not know where we are.

There are no regrets though. Work, and what I did was fun. It was an intellectually satisfying period, but it did happen at the expense of edging everything else away. That tide is now receding. It is time to clean up the debris left behind and to pick up the elements that fell off from the former life and stitch them back together.

Only now my eyes and mind are slowly adjusting to a new paradigm in which work is a room in which I enter through a door and at the end of the day leave the room through the same door for a different world.

Now I do not check the emails after hours or on weekends and make a concerted effort to read each day even if it is a few pages.

Talking about the frog there is another bit of scary trivia. How does rise in temperature by 1 Deg impacts human body? It raises the metabolic rate by 10%.

Ciao.