“LIFE’S A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION”
- RALPH WALDO EMERSON
In six months, I’ll be twenty. I would have lived two decades of my life. Now, when I look back, my past seems like a dream. When I try to have a recap of the life I’ve lived so far, I feel exactly like we do when we wake up abruptly while having a dream and try to ponder over what we were dreaming about. We can’t remember the details; we only remember if it was good or bad, intense or a meaningless set of activities, unrealistic, magical, weird yet beautiful activities. And all so soon, reality dawns upon us.
“It’s a new day and we must make it productive, memorable, and beautiful, better than any other day we have lived before”…. all such thoughts encroach our mind.
Our natural instinct to plan for the day kicks in……….And…….. the dream???Long forgotten. After all it was just a dream. It was just our restless and bored mind playing games with our tired body.
So we get over it and begin to live the real life in the real world.
But I believe that we just come out of one dream and start living in another. Only this one lasts quite longer than the usual ones but this too shall be over. I say so because the last twenty years of my life seem to have passed in the blink of an eye. Just like a dream, they seem surreal.
It might seem strange but dreams, to me, have always seemed as reminders of death.
They teach us how significant yet futile all our actions are. We are always running from one thing to another, jumping from task to task. Doing one thing, while planning the next. Secretly, being proud of our deftness until suddenly we are jolted awake only to realize the vanity of it all. But it’s generally too late for that for that realization to be of any significance. We had forgotten to savour the small moments of our lives when it would have mattered.
I’ve lived a happy life. Not always, but mostly I’ve had fun. I have achieved so many things so far and it makes me proud. Mistakes and failures have been my constant companions but that doesn’t bother me because they have turned me into what I am. As the saying goes in French,
“je ne regretted rein”
this means I REGRET NOTHING– that’s exactly how I feel.
LIVE IN THE MOMENT- It’s not a modern saying.
I’d known it all along. But needless to say, it’s easier said than done. No matter how blessed my life has been it hasn’t been mindful. I realize that now. I value my twenty years more now when they have passed than I did when I was living them. The thought that the next twenty years will pass just like the last twenty and I’d be thinking the same things at the age of forty scares me to my roots.
The most important thing one needs to do to live a more mindful life is to avoid multitasking. As enticing as it may seem to do two or more easy tasks simultaneously, living in an illusion that it is saving our time, multi tasking simply boggles our mind by continuously shifting our focus from one task to another.
So what we consider time saving actually ends up decreasing our productivity.
It divests us of the pleasure of doing even one thing properly.
Yes, pleasure!!! Even though we don’t like a particular thing; even though we think that some jobs are boring, time consuming or routine in nature, concentrating on them can bring us immense pleasure. Focusing on even the simplest acts of our day can bestow us with unimaginable peace of mind. And the sooner we understand it, the better.
We must bear in our minds that time passes stealthily.
As Alice Walker said,
“Time moves slowly but passes quickly”.
I am not scared of ageing. It’s just that I don’t want to waste my time. I want to live my life to the fullest. Make the best use of everything. Be the best version of myself. At night when I go to bed, I want to be exhausted. I want to fall asleep thinking about all the things that I did that day. I want to say to myself that regardless of the mistakes I made if I was given another chance to live this, I wouldn’t change a thing. And I want the same to be true for my whole life. I don’t want to ponder over my life at forty and think that it passed in an instant or that it passed waiting and working. I want to think that I valued every of my life. I knew it would never come again so I lived it to the fullest…… I lived every moment of my life before it became a memory.