Gratitude for the Simple Pleasures

What are the simple things in life that I am most grateful for? Many indeed. But let's start with the first one.

1. Waking up

I've said it before, sleeping is not much different from dying. We die every night to be reborn again the next day. There's no guarantee that you will wake up. You simply surrender to sleepiness when you put your head on the pillow. When you wake up, you have some vague awareness that you were dreaming and you remember going to bed the night before. But all these considerations only happen after you wake up.  If you did not wake up, none of that would have mattered. Your dream life is akin to life after death. Perhaps life in heaven is just like that and those who end up in hell are just living a perpetual nightmare.

To sleep is to practice dying--surrendering everything you've got, not knowing if you will ever regain it. When you wake up, it is another opportunity to make things better. You are given a second chance every morning. Yesterday is your past life--the momentum of its activities which you still carry. To wake up in the morning every day with the full realization that it is a new beginning, is the very gift of life itself.   

2. Reading and Writing

I write here because I consider writing a miraculous act of expression. Reading and writing are two sides of the coin. When you read, you are listening to someone else's thoughts and ideas. Very naturally you would also want to express your own thoughts. So you write. Writing crystalizes ideas and sets them into motion. The hidden value of your thoughts become clear when expressed, their weaknesses exposed when put to written form on a blank page. It is a stage for thoughts to sell their own worth.

I am the old-fashioned type who still reads the hardcopy newspaper every morning. Breakfast with the morning papers is one of the greatest joys of life. One to be cherished with gratitude.  In an era of audiobooks and podcasts, I shall also include listening as an alternate form of 'reading'. Reading reprograms the mind.  AI technology takes its inspiration from the neuron structure of the human brain. Every sentence read and comprehended creates a new wiring.  Every insight gained creates a dopamine hit in the brain. We feel rewarded and satiated.  It is a pleasure I consciously lap up every time I read. The pleasure one gets from reading far exceeds that of eating or drinking. I can never understand why people complain about the price of books when what they spend so much more on food. The pleasure of the written word is undoubted one of the greatest joys of living.

3. Walking

Being able to walk is a great blessing that we should never take for granted.  For those of us lucky enough to have fully functional limbs, walking is such an effortlessly beautiful act. It just propels you forward in space. Walk slowly and steadily, absorbing the scene that passes through your vision; watch people and their idiosyncrasies; savour the different smells and aroma from the street; feel the sensations on the soles of your feet as you gently lift and land them. Walking is sampling life in all its myriad richness.  Every walk we take should be an action of meditation--a reaffirmation of life itself. 

I try to walk whenever I could. I sometimes park slightly further away from my meeting place so that I can get a chance to walk and approach the location gently, giving me an opportunity to organize my thoughts. Walking is a way to work out thoughts--it is thinking in motion and an immeasurable source of pleasure in itself.

4. Sitting

To sit at a sidewalk cafe, sipping a cup of coffee, reading or watching people passing by--isn't that one of the great simple pleasures of life? When this simple act of repose is combined with the activity of reading and writing, it is a state of blissful existence, one which I try to indulge myself in every time I get the chance. 

When I'm in a foreign city, simply walking its streets and sitting at a restaurant or cafe is my preferred way of enjoying the place. You get to learn a lot about the people and the place from this simple act. Too many tourists rush through cities from one sight to another, without actually slowing down to absorb its real atmosphere. When you sit, you sense everything that's happening around you. You are part of the place, at least for that brief space of time. To sit is to pause and to acknowledge the richness of the moment.

Having the privilege to perform these four acts of simple pleasures already make my life meaningful. And of course, there are others: good food, wine, conversation with friends, helping someone in need, exercising, playing games and doing creative work. All these are part of the joy of living. But these four four, if performed with gratitude, are the very essence of living itself.

Meditations on a Blank Page

You always start with a blank page. And then words begin to emerge from the void. "In the begining was the Word...", as the scripture goes.

How am I to fill this blank page today? Well, by simply emptying the contents of my mind.

Isn't it remarkable how we can never stop thinking and yet when it comes to writing, our fingers freeze. The blankness of the page stares back at us. Why can't we use the same psychology to turn the tables on our monkey minds?

Whenever we face writer's block, our minds are actually not blank. In actual fact, they are brimming with thoughts--negative ones. These are mostly fear, disappointment and distractions. Fear that what we produce is not good enough; disappointment at every sentence that we attempt to produce and then conveniently jumping to other tracks of thoughts that are less demanding or stressful.

If we just dump every thought we have, no matter how unworthy they are on the page, we'll never run out of things to write about. I fear writing another pointless sentence like this one. And this one. But why fear as no one will be reading this anyway? It's because I demand that of myself: I want to write something that carries meaning and insight. Every sentence I write is a mental bicep curl, to strengthen my capability to produce sentences that carry meaning. 

I have fears also that what I write is of such poor quality that my readers (if there's any at all) will not think well of me. That's another trap I want to avoid. To write to impress my imaginary readers--it is a good exercise by itself but if it bothers you that someone is unimpressed by what you do, then you have set yourself up for a lot of suffering.

But don't we all want an approving audience for whatever we do--be it a new mobile app you've hacked, a live show performance or a newly-launched business? As a matter of fact, in the case of a business, it is the raison d'etre of its existence. A product that no one approves of will not make the creator any money.

A business is a self-imposed ego structure--like a new-born baby. It has to have an ego to have a meaningful existence. An ego has a personality, a vision and a goal which it strives towards. It's a self-imposed purpose of existence which sets itself for a lot of painful obstacles. No successful enterprise comes without pain or sacrifice. A business that produce goods and services which no one approves of, is always a risk that it has to be prepared for. 

What do we do if we need an audience but we are attracting none? Then we need to do something about it--change our product features, style or content; revise our marketing strategy and get feedback from the users. We have to make adjustments. A failure to make adjustments dooms a business. The ability to be agile and nimble, to react quickly to change is essential for any business to be successful. 

Rejection can be painful but is just another data point. Use it to chart your next course of action. Iterate again. Life is a series of iterations. Every advance thwarted is another piece of experience that could help us refine our products. Sometimes our goals are not realistic; we could have completely misread the market. Adjustments are needed. Take stock, readjust and retry.

A sentence that materializes on an empty page like this is the result of many iterations. Some of them occur in the mind; some on-screen with the help of the trusty backspace key. A sentence lurches forward in fits and starts. But there's a constant forward motion, driven by an over-riding vision and a goal. In my case, it is to come to this point: the last paragraph and the last word. Period.