As we bid adieu to 2017 and welcome 2018, and where we all are planning to take up some resolutions and hope to stick to it! Hope is tricky, my friend!
What I am suggesting is ditch resolutions for once and take on the next few coming years as one block rather than building aspirational resolutions for 2018 or 2019.
I am a big believer of “Live in the moment” brigade, but at the same time, I believe strongly that we need to think for a really long time ahead. And yes I am contradicting myself and I know it, bear with me for few more moments
Why long term? We may not even survive that long – But because if we don’t think long term then we are wiring ourselves to take up anything that takes longer to pay off and thus we don’t end up achieving anything meaningful. And it does make sense to assume that “Life is short” and just waste our time on the planet here.
The dilemma is real, and for all of us. One side of you battles the thought that we have limited time on the planet and thus we want to achieve things in the shorter time frame and keep running behind things. We all want everything very fast. But let me present the other side of the coin here – what if we had a longer time on the planet than we thought we do. One fine day, we wake up and realise due to some miraculous event overnight, life expectancy has gone by 5x from current 72 years for women to 360 years! Wow that’s a lot of adult life
How will you digest this and un-learn and re-learn the art of living as per your beliefs and change your mind-set. Trying doing that this holiday season and let me know what you come up with! We all have our own ways of defining how to best live our lives, we yearn for different things. For me – being satisfied with life and having no regrets whatsoever are the most crucial bits.
Coming back to whooping life expectancy and for ten minutes let’s give it a thought – now we have to put in more thoughts on the building block of LIFE, and for that “Living in the moment” theory needs to be thrown out of the window. All I say is don’t overdo it, and think pragmatically because when you think about these building blocks of LIFE you think differently about achieving everything in short span of time – wanting things NOW.
What this thought process did to me – it helps me assume that I am living forever and I have all the time on the earth to build something, something which takes longer than a couple of months or years to build. I have all the time to make more mistakes and learn more from them. I have all the time to specialise in more fields than the ones I did excel in college. I have all the time and reasons to invest more in people around as everyone is going to be here for a really long time. I have all the reason to take care of my surroundings and give it back to the universe. In short, we are in no hurry
Put all this in a small capsule and apply in your mortal life and see the shift in your mindset and the way you would start living your life and deriving satisfaction – because in the end that is what matters.
This article is written by Nayana Talwar who has been happily travelling since 1998 and writing about it. A long-time advocate of solo travel, she hopes that reading about her experiences will encourage other women to stop waiting for a travel partner and pursue their own travel dreams now.