Author: Madhuri

Writer - Children's Fiction & Ghost Writer

Spaces and Walls

When you live your life, do you see the Spaces? Or the Walls?

When I drove my Activa of 6 years, I looked for spaces that allowed me to move along. The rest was just a mass that I had to move past – people crossing the road, dogs dashing across, two-wheelers coming down the wrong way, bikes, cars, buses honking past – none of that mattered.

But when I became a new driver of a car, all I saw was every vehicle, person and animal on the road that was out there to stop me – the Walls. The Spaces disappeared. And I slowed down, sometimes coming to a standstill.

Same road, same traffic. A different me, hesitant and reluctant. It was unfamiliarity that brought on the difference.

It’s true of life too.

The world is the same. We see what we choose to see.

Those of us who see the Spaces, zip past, enjoying the breeze, the morning winter sun on our face and in control, never hesitating over a new direction, a new situation, an unfamiliarity.

Those of us who see the Walls, stop altogether. Or we slow down, too fearful to feel the breeze or the sun. We inch along, worrying ourselves in a new direction – if we move at all.

Yes, there are some basics to master. But the rest is our choice.

So do you see the Spaces? Or the Walls?

Teaching Confidence – Let Her Be Herself

We took the brand new, bright-blue Micra out one busy evening.

“Do you have someone to stand guard on it through the day and night?” asked Mr Duggal, my driving instructor.

“No,” said I.

“What if there’s a big scratch? What would you do?” he asked.

“What could I do?” said I. “I wouldn’t know who’s done it.”

“So when you take it out today,” said Mr Duggal, “The car may get a few scratches. It’s not any worse than an anonymous someone scratching it,” he said.

I smiled.

“So forget the scratches you might make and drive on,” said Mr Duggal.

 

Teaching confidence doesn’t come of warning your child

Of all the things she could break

When the most important thing is for her to learn.

Nobody ever learnt 2 things at a time.

1. To learn a thing

2. Without a scratch

Important thing isn’t that there never is a fall

But that she knows it’s ok to fall

And gets up when she does.

This helps her loosen up and be herself.

That’s how she builds confidence

And resilience and the zillion other things that give her success and peace.

 

Teaching Confidence – They Know Best

Teaching Confidence – They Know Best

Last week I learnt about teaching confidence from my driving instructor. He was teaching me of crunching gears, stalling 4-wheelers and sliding-backward-down-a-slope cars.

“Will I clear that cart by the left?” I asked.

“You tell me,” said Mr Duggal, looking straight ahead. He’d never once look at me.

“Look out for the cart,” he didn’t shout like dad would.

The car rolled clear of the cart.

“You know best,” said Mr Duggal with the red eye. “And you know right. Have confidence in y’self,” he said.

***

Teaching confidence doesn’t come of cautioning your daughter to death.

It doesn’t come of putting the fear of God into your son.

Teaching confidence comes of letting them do their little things their own way.

It comes of talking about the big things and letting go.

Teaching confidence comes of holding yourself back from pouncing on their every move like a hawk over a mouse – leaving beneath a trembling mouse.

It comes of holding back from rubbing off on them your fears of Can They?

Teaching confidence comes of letting them know that you think They Can.

Within 500 Feet

Nearby foreclosures depress home prices, says a recent Harvard Daily Stat.

The same applies to our lives too.

Nearby corruption

Nearby depression

Nearby violence

Nearby goodness

Nearby happiness

Nearby greatness

There are an uncommon few who rise above their surroundings and create a good life for themselves – or bad lives. But for the rest, our surroundings affect our behaviour more than we’d care to think.

The stat goes on to say – “The presence of a foreclosed property within a distance of 250 feet depresses a home’s price by about 1%. The effect is cumulative, with multiple nearby foreclosures depressing the value of other properties by several percentage points.”

One violent person may not turn the others violent. But a family of them can. A village of them most certainly can. A country of them, well, we’ve seen it with WW II.

“A distance of 500 feet is required for a home to be unaffected by a foreclosure.”

If you are the uncommon kind who can remain unaffected, by all means, live where you please. But, if there’s the least inkling that it is affecting you, stay the metaphorical 500 feet away.

To know whether you are where you want to be, think of what you want to live your life by. If your real life doesn’t match with that, remove yourself from the 500 feet circle.

Since you can’t move yourself physically out of where you are, how can you stay away?

By watching your every thought and every act.

And making the tiny correction each time you deviate.

As Life Happens

I went through school thinking I was learning for later life
Then I learnt that while a million things kept me busy at school
The real work that happened was about sharpening my brain and dealing with people.

I began going through work and life,
Planning on reaching the next level each day, each year.
But as I reach out, I realise
Life isn’t about reaching the next level.

I learnt that the real work in life is to know myself.
The real me.
The one that is neither good, nor bad.
Neither smart nor dumb.
Not a mother, not a daughter, not a friend – just me.
I am still peeling the layers.

The rest are things that keep me busy as I do the real work.

Making your Choices

Making your choices has little to do with safety.
Sometimes, they look like safe choices,
Other times, they don’t.
That’s when people can’t understand you.

Sometimes, they say – you are doing the easy thing.
Other times, they say – you are limiting your choices.
Yet other times, they say – what’s the point?

You aren’t doing the easy thing. You’re doing what your heart tells you to.
You aren’t limiting yourself. You’re focusing.
Finally, the point is – you’re doing what you’re meant to do.

They may not know your reasons.
They will attribute their reasons to your act.
And it won’t make sense to them.
Those opinions don’t count.

So long as you can truly hear your heart,
Go make your choice.
Make your place in the world.
It’s your dream, your experiment, your life.

If we can Set Aside our Need for Praise

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d appreciate others more.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d denigrate others less.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d feel less hurt when someone else is praised.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d be truly happy for others.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d see the good in others more often.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d feel less threatened by others.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d be more content and less acquisitive.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d need less importance.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d be more discerning of true value.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d let go of the unimportant things in life.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d smile more often.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d walk with a swing in our step.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d love others more.

If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d love ourselves more.


If we can set aside our need for praise, we’d live our lives more.

The Quest for Learning

Childhood’s a time when we learn extensively, picking up enormous amounts of information, learning from our parents, teachers, our environment.

We carry no limitations of who we can learn from, and who we cannot. Nor of consciously hoarding information and not letting on. We have an intense desire to learn. Of course our tendency towards indiscriminate learning makes some restraint and guidance necessary.

And then we grow up.

We lose a lot of things on our way from childhood to adulthood. We lose the 3 most important things that can help us learn at our peak.

  1. Humility
  2. Openness
  3. Desire to learn

1. Humility allows us to admit to ourselves that there is something to learn from others. The day we believe that we know more than our neighbour, our learning slows down. Humility means respecting the other – peers, superiors, juniors, strangers – irrespective of their station in life, and there’s plenty to learn from all.

Secondly, when we are more ready to speak than to listen, we aren’t trying to learn. We are posing. We are taking pride in the little that we know. And we pay less attention to the vast amount that we don’t know.

Why do we lose the humility to learn?

Maybe to a lot of us, to admit that we have something to learn is to admit to a weakness – our mistakes, our shortcomings, the gaps in our knowledge or performance. A weakness in our world is not looked upon with favour. It’s a brave few who do it; they are the ones who benefit enormously by admitting that they have more to learn.

2. Openness is the readiness to share our thoughts, our ideas without hoarding them. Of accepting others’ ideas without prejudice and in turn giving our own to help others. Neither money nor knowledge ever grew with hoarding. It grows with opening it to others – with allowing others to add to it.

Openness means that we do not become acquisitive with our space, time and ideas. It also means that we are open to feedback. The sad part is that we define ourselves through our work. And a feedback for correction shows the gaps in our work. We can embrace it with openness. Or we can fight it, believing that it belittles us.

What works against openness?

When we look for praise, and when we look for personal acquisitive gain, we work against openness. When we look for praise we are looking outward for our sense of worth, we aren’t looking for intrinsic self-worth. When that happens, the community and the public become the judge of what we do and what we don’t. And hence, how we learn. And how we share.

There isn’t much wrong with personal gain. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of private initiative. But when the gain – fame, money, power or any number of such derived attributes – becomes the primary focus, the importance we give to the essential things in life gets sidelined.

In both cases, we hoard learning wanting it to benefit us and us alone. In doing so, we minimize our learning and lose the chance to maximize it.

3. The Desire to Learn is the most basic requirement, so much so that without it there is no learning. Somewhere along our growing years, we lose our desire for active learning and we lose our inquisitive minds. The millions of questions of our childhood drop to a handful.

Why do we lose the desire to learn?

Because learning requires active work. Choosing not to learn is in some, a reflection of laziness. In others, it is an indication of comfort with the status quo.

Learning forces us to constantly sift through our beliefs and knowledge and make continual adjustments based on new facts and observations; to admit that what we believed yesterday could be wrong or at best, may no longer hold good today. With time, we seem to lose our flexibility and our readiness to change. What’s easier than to live as we are, where we are, with whatever knowledge and belief systems we have – it looks solid. While change looks like the shifting sands.

But why should we learn?

 Because learning was what helped us adapt to our surroundings and our advancement across millions of years. Of moving from the sea to land, to moving from early humans to the current civilizations and more.

We wouldn’t be where we are without learning. We would be where we are without learning.

Now, that’s a depressing scenario.

Star? Middler? Lounger?

What are you?

Star? Middler? Or Lounger?

Stars are stars – so good at their work that they can bring you to tears or make you take a deep sense of pride with their depth of emotion, intellectual prowess, empathy, efficiency or any number of things that mark a star. Their heart’s in it. And they’ve put enormous amounts of hard work behind it.

Middlers – are very good at what they do in a learned, conscious way. They know the technicalities, they have the experience; but they stop just short of the sheer genius, the depth and innovativeness of the stars. Their hard work, sweat and blood takes them to where they are.

Loungers – Their work doesn’t amount to much because this category doesn’t put in even the hard work that’s needed. They get by with the bare minimum work that is needed to make things go – not an inch more.

You could be a star, a middler or a lounger all at the same time, in different domains.

I’m a lounger when it comes to configuring my wireless. I need Configuration Basics for the Dummies to do it and I can still go wrong. Or I could take hours for a thing my sys admin Chetan takes minutes to set up.

I’m a middler when it comes to speaking in public. I probably wouldn’t do what a Clinton or an Obama could. I do the hard work before the presentation, but my heart’s not wholly in it.

I belong somewhere in the bottom rungs of star where writing is concerned. Don’t count me arrogant, I’m giving an example – there’s plenty to learn before I can really belong in the star category.

How do you choose a category?

You don’t choose a category, the category chooses you.

Singers gravitate towards singing, painters move towards painting even if you put them in construction or the military. Writing chose me while I was hell bent on the business world. I didn’t choose writing.

So the right question is – Which is your Star Category?

If you’re a doctor when you should be singing your heart out, you’ll probably end up being a lounger or a middler in your medicine. But trust yourself, move to singing, and you have all chances of becoming a Star.

Before you mistake my definition of a Star, it isn’t about fame. It’s about being the absolute best, the greatest, the untouchable one in your category. It’s the thing that lets you lose yourself in it, become one with it – where the singing itself becomes an extension of you, like your own skin or deeper.

You may have to give up a few things in life to make it there. Not all domains pay well. Not all domains bring power. Not all are acceptable to your family, and they most likely don’t match the dreams you’ve dreamt for all the wrong reasons. Because when we look at the world and follow it, we forget to follow our heart and soul.

Listen to your Heart – you’ll find your Star Category.

Put daily, hard work behind it – you’ll become the Star.