Are you excited to be on the precipice of a brand new year? A brand new set of 365 days are to unfold and if we are blessed enough we might get to see them all. But are you ready to truly live it up to your best and fullest potential? Are you ready to stop fear from calling the shots and chase your wildest dreams?
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Own Your Everyday series of the Being Meraklis podcast and the very first episode of 2023. I’m your host and self-awareness coach Shwetha Sivaraman and I want to first begin by wishing all of you amazing listeners a very happy new year! This will be our 3rd year of continuing a new year tradition of recording a new year message on our podcast, and I’m truly grateful to every one of you for tuning in, sharing your feedback, and giving me the motivation to continue spending time in making podcasts – yet another year.
As with every year, I spent all of December reflecting, holding space for many of you, and wondering what the theme for 2023 should be. In 2020, the theme was shedding unnecessary emotional baggage, In 2021 I felt it needed to be about learning to believe in ourselves which we’d almost forgotten on our adulting journey. This year, unsurprisingly it came through to me in the middle of the night and I simply had to wake up to capture it and it was this –
Challenge the status quo and stop settling for half-lives.
In the last many years, I’ve spoken to so many individuals – youngsters in their early 20s filled with hope and optimism but confused about what is their path, adults in their 30s and 40s muddling along the same not-so-great but not-so-bad path because that’s what they’ve been doing so far, folks in their 50s and 60s regretting their past and wishing they did things better when they had more health, vitality, energy, and motivation. And, every time it breaks my heart.
It’s great to go with the flow of life once we know who we are, and what matters most to us, and are generally going on the right track where our beliefs, values, and actions are aligned. But when we don’t pause to reflect on who we are and what matters and simply go with the flow – we end up with regret because we don’t actively make decisions to create the life we desire. We simply plod along wherever other’s agenda takes us over the years, and suddenly look back in our 40s and 50s only to realise we wanted no part in this – ever.
Somewhere between adolescence and old age – adulthood slips by before we get a grasp on it. Years go by and we suddenly wake up to realise we could have feared less, lived more, and cherished more.
In 2020, the pandemic and the consequently forced stoppage of all activities made us all pause, smell the roses, re-examine our choices, and more. We absorbed shock after shock with every wave, and now seem to be on a rebound, where we are running faster than ever, in a rush to acquire the time and experiences lost. We are back to our busy schedules, the pursuit of material things and external validation with even more craze to make up for the time we lost. But does it feel the same for you this time?
Chances are something doesn’t fit right in – going back to life as it was because we are no longer who we were before the pandemic. Events like the pandemic shift something in us and awaken something in us, that doesn’t want to go back to sleep just yet.
If there’s one thing I wish to do personally and urge you to consider this year – is to be intentional with our lives. Don’t just go with the flow, instead stop and ask the critical questions and get comfortable not knowing the answers now than regret it a few decades later. Because if we don’t get intentional with our lives today if we don’t actively choose what we want to engage in and how others will decide it for us and our wildest dreams will simply wither away with the sands of time.
Almost all of us know that time is the most precious resource we have, but that’s the one thing we spend heedlessly without a second thought. We keep whiling time away and leading half lives stuck in less than satisfying jobs, not very fulfilling relationships, and toxic environments. Why do we do that? Because it’s comfortable, familiar, and a well-traversed path for most of us. Challenging the status quo and asking for more from life requires us to feel uncomfortable and fight hard to get what we truly desire.
In Vedanta, there’s this concept of Shreyas and Preyas.
Preyas is the path of the pleasant – we take the path of least resistance in the short run without thinking about the long-term consequences of our choices and actions.
Shreyas on the other hand is the path of good – it’s a treacherous past in the short run but one that we know will lead us to the right destinations in the future.
As humans, we are automatically wired to take the path of the pleasant, to choose Preyas over Shreyas because we cannot quite comprehend or quantify those intangible long-term benefits.
Neuroscience calls this temporal discounting – where we favour our current self over our future self. It’s an ingrained survival mechanism to ensure you’re safe now. This works when we were more connected to nature and survival was the only goal. But in our comfortable lives in concrete jungles, this mechanism is detrimental. This is the ingrained mechanism that says yes to sugar now, again and again, that wants to snooze another hour in the morning and skip those workouts because you don’t feel like it now.
This also makes us postpone decisions with undesirable short-term consequences in the future. Leaving not so satisfactory job would mean discomfort in the short run because you’re going to be confused, you’re not going to be at ease in putting yourself out there, applying to new jobs, – so you rationalize and make peace with it because it’s not that uncomfortable yet, it doesn’t threaten your survival just yet. Our brains discount the consequences and the regret our future self might experience and so we continue living in the status quo.
Let 2023 be the year you challenge the status quo. Bring your future self into the decision-making process. Ask yourself how taking a decision or not taking one will impact you in the next 5 or 10 years. What action to this decision will put me closer to the goal? And prudently make choices and actions today that will make the future you proud.
Stop believing you have all the time in the world to make your dreams happen. Us surviving a pandemic is itself nothing short of a miracle. It’s time we wake up from this deep slumber we’ve let ourselves fall under, time to stop letting fear call the shots, time to stop chasing material goals that don’t quite quench us and only leave us hankering for more, it’s time to feed our souls, take bold moves, and do things that fulfil us and make us feel whole. Because. Kal ho na ho. Who knows if we get a tomorrow? Be deliberate with your time today and start living life the Meraklis way.
What does the Meraklis way of living look like you might ask?
1. Pause and Rest – Pausing long enough to deepen awareness and get clarity on what matters most. Not just once in a blue moon, but pausing, being, and resting frequently to reflect, ask the right questions, and check if we are on the right path before we do more.
2. Intentional Living – Once clarity is there Be intentional in our thoughts words and actions and chiselling a life that is meaningful to us.
3. Faith over Fear – We can either believe the universe is conspiring with us or against us in our lives. Given how fragile & limited human lives and our powers truly are, it is better to believe we live in a world that conspires with us in creating our dreams than trying to do it on our own. Living life the Meraklis way entails fearlessly pursuing our goals with self-belief and faith knowing that when we embark on the path, the entire universe will conspire with us in making it happen. This also requires us to stay equanimous and accept outcomes that may not be/seem favourable to us at the moment. It is easy to be optimistic in good times – we need to keep the trust and faith in the hardest times – that’s where the magic lies.
4. Do with all your presence – one of the missing ingredients to make the most of our days and our lives is our presence. When we are fully present and involved in the tasks at hand, the quality and texture of it become different. So whatever you choose to do – see how you can be more present in it.
5. Making the ordinary extraordinary – finding ways to cherish the process and not suffer through our life. Probably the most important aspect – how can we find joy wherever we are and celebrate ourselves and our progress right here and right now? We may not have all the answers and know whether we are going to make it or not – but try we will to the best of our abilities to savour each moment through the peaks and lows of our journey.
So there are the 5 principles to Meraklis living and the own your everyday tip for not just this week but for the entire year – Stop settling for half-lives, challenge the status quo and live your best Meraklis life each day and every day.
This is Shwetha signing off wishing you a phenomenal year ahead!