Reflections from the Year gone by...

2019 has been an eventful year, to put it mildly.  In this post, I am going to synthesize the year that was and my learning from it. 

There were many positive things that happened. I saw my sister get married to her friend of many years. I chose to follow my purpose and explore what acting towards it looks like. I went on my first solo travel to Vietnam and spent the remaining time of my sabbatical learning more about change. I participated in a transformational three-month journey with the uLabs community. I also grew physically stronger and healthier. I reconnected with friends more consistently than ever before. I started writing again. At a societal level, it was good to see pockets of hope - masses beginning to question the status quo and seek the truth behind choices made by those in power - whether it was against climate change (eg. Fridays For Future), whether against corruption (eg. Iran), whether against bigotry (eg. anti-trump rally), whether for equality (eg. #MeToo) or whether for freedom (eg. Hong Kong). 

There were some negative episodes too. I lost my father-in-law and our cat Cleo, and thanks to them, I spent more time in the hospital than I ever have before. I struggled in building discipline in my reflective practice and took steps backward on mindfulness. On a global scale, I saw the world in strife, more polarized than ever (including the gradual dismantling of our institutional integrity in India). I saw climate change was showing its signs much faster, with forest and bush fires, with floods and with irreversible glacial melts in many habitats and yet, human activity that destroys nature continuing unabated (like legalizing mining in Amazon).

Overall, this year has helped me feel many contrasting emotions - joy and sorrow, anger and peace, hope and despair, fatigue and enthusiasm, learning and distraction, connectedness and polarization, love and hate, compassion and conflict, helplessness and empowerment, etc. However, while I remember everything that was not good, I don't think I have let that feeling of negativity linger. 

Zooming out, there have been a few key lessons that I have learned: 

There is power in reflection but there is greater power in presencing: All these years, I used reflection as a tool to build awareness of self. However, the actions I took were often focused on improving the effectiveness of what I did and highly intellectual in nature. This time, I shifted the source of my action from just intellectual insight to the energy that I felt in social fields I participated in. Moreover, I did not sit on it for too long and quickly translated what emerged into small actions. I have found this to not just narrow the spiritual divide that I used to feel, but help me find paths which I initially thought didn't exist.

All you need is people who deeply understand each other and broadly align with one another: I spent a lot of my time observing movements that shaped the world. It kept taking me back to Margaret Mead's quote "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." While the modern media is filled with narratives of everything that is going wrong, I felt there was so much power in the movements that began or expanded in 2019. Sometimes, movements may seem to have little impact, but the role they play in building a civic or social muscle in people is undeniable. Closer to home, I found a community of colleagues who are on a shared journey to understand these ideas and help them grow. I found work with a team that is working on enabling a movement for wellbeing. Although inconsistently, I engaged in local efforts, towards bettering animal welfare, urban mobility, environmental preservation, and better governance. Through these communities, I found the courage to do what is necessary.

Death is the best teacher: I think watching two loved ones die pushes you a lot to think about the purpose of life. Spending the time tending to them, seeing their suffering, saying your final good-byes makes you ponder about: What is a life worth living? How would you want the world to remember you? What are the things that are important in life? What is detachment? 

In the process, there were a few things that I discovered:

• Treating your emotions as a 'butterfly' - they come and they go - and thus, while we acknowledge their coming and going, we don't lose ourselves in it.
• Living your values every day without circumscribed boundaries is incredibly difficult is the best way to being happy and finding greater meaning
• Material wealth is important as long as it allows for better utilization, protection or nurturing of one's body, but that is about it as far as its link to happiness and prosperity is concerned
• There are four enemies that prevent us from truly living meaningfully: Past (Regret: I should have, could have...), Future (Worry: I don't know if...), Them (Blame: It is because of them...) and Me (or Ego: What is in it for me, what about my idea/my opinion, etc...) 

To love someone is to understand their suffering and your interbeing with them: I am going to not use my words, but copy the paragraph on 'interbeing' by Thich-Nhat-Hanh that was the source of my inspiration. I am still in the process of understanding and living this, but I hope it has the same impact on you as it did on me. 

"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen. 

When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of his suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if she doesn’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief. 

The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same. 

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering."

With this, I come to the end of my post. In the year ahead, I wish you all more curiosity to understand perspectives different from yours, more compassion to feel another's suffering and more courage to follow your heart and do what is right and needed.